According to documents discovered by ESPN through searches of public records, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and NFL lawyers have called sports betting a “game of skill” in past legal arguments.

In 2003, the NFL was among several groups attempting to prevent the state of Delaware from reintroducing a football-based lottery game. The NFL hired the law firm of Covington & Burlington to argue against allowing such bets, characterizing the football-based lottery as a predominately skill-based game, and therefore would be barred by the state’s own constitution.

“Sports betting combines both skill and chance, but the element of chance, though perhaps significant, is not ‘dominant,’” the Covington & Burlington lawyers wrote in a 2003 memo to the Delaware legislature. “Typical sports bettors gather and analyze information, sometimes in significant quantities, about the nuances of the sports on which they bet…they then weight the probabilities of each team winning and compare their determinations to those of the odds-maker.”

A similar argument was made by Lynch in the United States v. DiCristina in 2013, explaining how certain sports bettors move betting lines, a technique similar to bluffing in poker.