Two familiar sports-betting names stopped meaning what they used to mean in December 2025, three weeks apart, and neither change was a scandal. ESPN BET vs Underdog sounds like it should be a sportsbook-versus-DFS matchup. It isn’t anymore — one of these two products doesn’t exist under either name, and the other only looks gone because the logo changed.
Is ESPN BET Legit? Yes — Look for theScore Bet Instead
ESPN BET launched in November 2023 when PENN Entertainment licensed the ESPN trademark for roughly $1.5–2 billion over ten years and slapped it on its existing Barstool Sportsbook platform. PENN and ESPN mutually agreed to end that deal early, and on December 1, 2025 PENN stopped using the ESPN name entirely, relaunching the identical product as theScore Bet, built around PENN’s Canadian theScore media brand. Same operator, same state licenses, same accounts. Nothing about the underlying sportsbook changed except what it’s called.
What actually moved: account balances, betting history, and open wagers transferred automatically from ESPN BET to theScore Bet. Nobody had to re-register, and nobody lost anything in the switch — it was a trademark expiration, not an exit.
Is Underdog a Sportsbook? Not Since December 2025
Underdog took the opposite path. It built a real-money sportsbook, ran it for a stretch, and then shut it down nationwide in December 2025 — the same month ESPN BET disappeared, purely by coincidence — settling every open North Carolina wager rather than keep chasing more state licenses. Nothing replaced it under the Underdog name. What remains is pick’em DFS, split into two differently licensed products (Classic Pick’em under the state DFS exemption, the peer-to-peer Pick’em Champions licensed state by state), plus a brand-new arm launched in July 2026: Underdog Predict, a CFTC-licensed prediction-market exchange built on Underdog’s own federal derivatives registrations.
ESPN BET vs Underdog, side by side
| ESPN BET | Underdog | |
|---|---|---|
| What changed in Dec. 2025 | Renamed to theScore Bet | Sportsbook closed nationwide |
| Sportsbook today | Live, under a new name | Does not exist |
| Operator | PENN Entertainment | Underdog Sports, Inc. |
| What’s still live | theScore Bet sportsbook, same states | Classic Pick’em, Pick’em Champions, Predict |
| Regulatory record | State sportsbook licenses (unaffected) | $17.5M NY settlement (Mar. 2025); own CFTC DCM |
| Product type now | Licensed sportsbook (as theScore Bet) | DFS pick’em + prediction-market exchange |
Is Either One Safe to Have Money With?
Both companies are the kind of operator regulators can actually reach — that’s the part worth separating from the name changes. PENN Entertainment is a publicly traded gaming company with decades of state licenses, and its rebrand didn’t touch the licensing or the geolocation that keeps theScore Bet tied to each state’s rules. Underdog paid New York $17.5 million in March 2025 over contests regulators said went beyond its old permit, then held onto its business and later earned its own CFTC Designated Contract Market registration for Predict — a real fine followed by real federal licensing, not a company that skipped town.
Which One for Who
- Readers who had an ESPN BET account: nothing to do — log into theScore Bet with the same credentials, same balance, same open bets.
- Readers who want a moneyline bet today: that’s theScore Bet (ESPN BET’s successor), not Underdog, which has no sportsbook at all anymore.
- Readers who liked Underdog’s pick’em contests: those are unaffected by the sportsbook closure and still running in roughly 15 states, separate from whatever happened to ESPN BET.
- Readers curious about prediction markets: Underdog Predict is the newer, federally licensed product to look at — ESPN BET (as theScore Bet) doesn’t operate in that space at all.