Whenever someone is accused of any type of wrongdoing, the threshold question becomes whether there’s any “there” there. When it comes to the situation involving ESPN NFL draft analyst Matt Miller, there’s so much there to unravel that it becomes nearly impossible to imagine that every single oddity can be explained away as something not illegitimate.
More than two weeks after Awful Announcing became the first publication to dip a toe into the murky waters of online allegations regarding irregularities in Miller’s fantasy football leagues, paid scouting lessons, and charitable efforts supported by him, The Athletic has taken a close look at the situation.
The most obvious takeaway is that, yes, the investigation started by the Missouri Attorney General’s Office (and based on 26 complaints, to date) will be “kind of lengthy” — because there’s a lot to understand and to unpack.
One of the most significant developments in the lengthy article comes from Miller making his first comments on the situation.
“Because this is an active investigation, I’ve been told by legal counsel to limit my response,” Miller told The Athletic via email. “However, I’ve tried reaching out to all the [fantasy league] winners from the last season to make sure they’ve been paid. My [direct messages] on all social media remain open for winners to contact me. Because of my limited access to my original email account, I have had trouble authenticating winners, but everyone who finished in first, second or third place will be paid out and I’ve worked hard to make that happen.”
Hard work is the key phrase. It appears that it will require very hard work to pick through the various transactions and figure out whether people did, or didn’t, get the payments they were owed from Miller.
As The Athletic explains, Miller used his personal Venmo account to collect money, and his efforts to promote and explain the charitable component of the various leagues were, as The Athletic puts it, “inconsistent.”
The structure of the payment procedures creates real concerns, in the opinion of CharityWatch CEO Laurie Styron.
“The mere fact that it’s so unclear is problematic in and of itself,” Styron told The Athletic. “If people were basing their decision of whether or not to participate on the fact that you asserted that the money was going to charity, then you may have misled them about how their money would be used. Whether or not the letter of the law was being followed, that’s definitely unethical.”
The task of figuring out where the money came from and where it went will take plenty of elbow grease. As The Athletic notes (and as had been reported elsewhere), Miller hosted 91 fantasy football leagues during the 2025 NFL season on the fantasy sports platform known as Sleeper. That alone would have generated roughly $100,000 in entry fees, per The Athletic.
Miller told The Athletic that the figure did “not seem accurate.” He added that he couldn’t verify the number because he does not have access to his Sleeper account.
That’s because, per The Athletic, Sleeper banned Miller in May 2026 for “stealing buy-ins from managers and not paying out league winners.”
So where did the money for the fantasy leagues go? How much went to charity? How much went to winners? Ultimately, how much (if any) went into Miller’s pocket?
Per The Athletic, “Miller declined to provide documentation of donations or comment about whether all of the money he said would go to charity made its way there.”
Now, the Missouri Attorney General’s Office will be sorting it all out.
Even before the online backlash that followed the launch of a GoFundMe effort for the expenses arising from Miller’s serious car accident on June 17, the storm clouds were gathering.
A lawyer who participated in one of Miller’s 2025 fantasy leagues and finished in second place told The Athletic that he had emailed both Miller and an ESPN P.R. rep about Miller’s failure to issue payment. The lawyer vowed to contact ESPN’s general counsel if no response was provided, and that he would “blast out on various social media platforms to every analyst and content creator in the fantasy football space that I can think of in order to advise them to beware of this possible scam by Mr. Miller.”
The situation clearly pulls ESPN’s brand and reputation into the morass.
“The only reason I joined this league was because it was Matt Miller from ESPN,” the lawyer told The Athletic. “You’d never Venmo somebody you didn’t know $100 to join a fantasy league, but he advertises through his official ESPN account, which made it seem like, ‘Okay, this has gotta be legit.’”
The Athletic reiterates that Miller is on leave from ESPN, and that ESPN will address the complaints with Miller at the appropriate time. Depending on how quickly the Missouri Attorney General’s investigation proceeds, how intense the media coverage becomes, and whether the Department of Justice becomes involved in transactions that undoubtedly occurred in interstate commerce, ESPN may not have the luxury to press pause on this issue indefinitely.
At some point, it goes beyond whether and to what extent ESPN will discipline Miller. Given the extent to which Miller was using his ESPN platform to support paid fantasy leagues ostensibly for charity, someone may eventually start asking what ESPN knew, when ESPN knew it, and whether ESPN did anything about it.
