Reflection Paper Of Fantasy Sports

This year I attended the Michigan Sports Business Conference for the first time and I was extremely pleased with the quality and professionalism displayed throughout the entire conference. I had the opportunity to witness numerous guest speakers and analyze the different types of speaking styles and presentations. Early after lunch, I attended a presentation called, The Business of Fantasy Sports. This presentation designed to allow an audience to hear how Fantasy Sports is becoming a huge market in media today, and how it tied in with the theme of the conference, which was The Digitial Age. The design of the presentation was one that consisted of a moderator asking an expert some questions about the topic, much like the first keynote conversation

Also, I am extremely aware of how much daily fantasy sports have grown in general and I figured this conversation could have some important information for me as I consider my future career options that are hopefully in the sports world. Sam provided Nik with a series of talking points and questions about Fantasy Sports in the world today and how it is affecting the sport industry. Some main points that Nik emphasized were that daily fantasy sports are so successful because they give fans a reason to care about games they would not normally care about. For example, the NFL has games in London almost every Sunday morning, usually consisting of two awful teams competing against one another. Typically most people would not wake up and watch an awful game like that, but when they have fantasy players involved in the game and potentially a lot of money on the line, fans are provided with a reason to tune in and care about the outcome of the game. Nik also touched on the controversy of daily fantasy sports, which, in short, consists of betting money on specific players in sporting events against other people. Sports gambling is illegal in the United States everywhere except Las Vegas, so why is daily fantasy sports not considered gambling? Nik had tremendous insight on this topic because of his company Numberfire, which essentially uses mathematics and statistics to predict the

Most of the presentation was done in a monotone voice and he rarely changed his pitch or showed strong emotions when making critical points. I realize that it might not be his personality style, but I didn’t get the feeling that Nik really cared about the audience absorbing the information that he was presenting. There were not a lot of topics that required extreme emotion to be displayed, but when he defended the Fanduel and draftking scandal, he did not display the emotion or really seem to care if we thought he was telling the truth. Also, the presentation lacked audience participation and therefore it lacked audience feedback. The audience consisted of mostly males between the ages of 19 and 24, however there were some outliers. Most of the audience members most likely had significant interest in sports and business and had serious interest in what Nik had to present. However, Nik seemed to be more interested in his conversation with Sam than how the audience was feeling about what he was saying. It seemed as though he avoided using techniques that we use in class to keep the audiences attention. There was no floor movement, he just sat in the chair and looked at Sam most of the time. The lack of eye contact with the audience and floor movement did not help the presentation make the audience or, at least me, feel engaged in the presentation in any way. Due to the lack of movement and