Exactly. This is solely about a huge new economic engine and everyone wants their piece of it. It isn't going away. The government getting a piece of it is just a developmental step. Making it temporarily illegal is just a tactic.
Fantasy football is an immensely important part of keeping the NFL relevant throughout the season to a wide audience. Without it, half of the teams and players in the league are already irrelevant, because everyone knows they don't have a meaningful chance at the playoffs, and we are only in early November.
For the next 8-12 weeks, fans of Miami, Baltimore, Cleveland, Kansas City, San Diego, Jacksonville, Tennessee, New Orleans, Tampa Bay, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Dallas, and San Francisco would have largely lost interest. Instead, millions of them are now glued to their TV sets for the full NFL season as their interest shifts completely to individual players rather than teams. The list of teams will now grow with each passing week.
If the NFL brass had come up with this, it would have been one of the most brilliant innovations in modern times. But most of them lucked into it (Goodell and most of the owners again being born on third base) and will reap massive benefits from it.
U.S. history has demonstrated repeatedly that these things don't get regulated away, they just get regulated into a certain order.
Kraft was prescient when he bought in early.