Sports Betting Has Gone Too Far
I hit the under on how many terrible puns I would make in the title
It is frighteningly easy to bet on sports.
Standing in the parking lot of MetLife Stadium waiting to enter the Notre Dame – Navy game and basking in the glow of tailgate beers, nothing seemed like a better idea to me than placing a bet on college football. The entire process of downloading DraftKings, logging in, and sending money to my account through Venmo took less time and effort than paying rent each month.
I am glad sports betting is legal. Prohibition is ineffective when the banned product can easily be illegally replicated, as shown by alcohol, marijuana, and the plethora of pre-legalization sports betting scandals. By the late turn of the millennium, as the rise of internet sports betting made it clear that even the arrest of every mafioso in the country would not be enough to close the books, it was obvious that the legal framework around sports gambling needed to change.
Thanks to the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, legal bets on sports outside of Nevada required either an act of Congress or a Supreme Court ruling, the latter of which New Jersey achieved in 2018. The floodgates opened, and now, just six years later, 38 of our 50 states (plus D.C. and Puerto Rico) have legal sports gambling.
States with legal betting are cashing in, funding government services with money that would have otherwise been captured by Las Vegas or kept off the books entirely. New York will likely be the first state to exceed $1 billion in sports gambling tax revenues.
As for corruption, keeping sports gambling in the open allows for swift action to be taken by leagues when suspicious bets are being placed, protecting vulnerable college athletes from bad actors and ensuring the integrity of athletic contests.
More money for schools and snow plows and fewer rigged matches and blackmailed college sophomores feels like a win-win. And yet my MetLife experience made it clear to me that something is very wrong with how we have handled the rollout of sports gambling.
One aspect of legal sports betting that has never set well with me is how sports media and sportsbooks are intertwined. Barstool Sports podcast Pardon My Take is one of the biggest sports shows in the country, and its hosts have spent much of the season waging a half-serious campaign for Travis Hunter to win the Heisman. Pardon My Take is also “presented by DraftKings,” offering listeners promo codes and special lines if they place their wagers with DraftKings.
Until August 2023, Pardon My Take was even more ingrained in the sports gambling ecosystem, as their parent company Barstool Sports operated its own sportsbook. Barstool Sportsbook was a huge loss for casino-giant Penn Entertainment, so Penn wrote off its Barstool losses and promptly licensed one of the few properties of sports media bigger than Barstool: ESPN.
The existence of ESPN Bet casts aspersions on the network’s coverage every time gambling is mentioned. Garbage-time touchdowns now elicit tongue-in-cheek comments from broadcasters, and ESPN shows live odds on screen during certain contests.
With the stock market, there are strict rules about disclosures for the financial media. Every stock pick article you read tells you at the end whether the author or website owns shares in the company. There are no similar requirements for gambling, so when ESPN’s NBA beat reporter falsely asserted Jabari Smith would be drafted number one shortly before the 2022 draft, causing odds on who would be picked first to fluctuate wildly, there was a small but reasonable question of whether he or anyone else involved in the erroneous scoop profited.
With the stock market, insider trading laws apply to anyone, regardless of whether they work for the companies involved in the trade, but there is no Securities and Exchange Commission of gambling, leaving each state to handle regulation separately. Perhaps sports bets are another realm that could be overseen by my proposed Department of Sport.
Sports broadcasts are also heavily saturated with ads for gambling, with ads for MGM and DraftKings and FanDuel crowding out electoral ads in my market. Less than a decade after arguing in federal court against the legalization of sports betting, all the major professional leagues have official gambling partners. Ads for the books can even be seen inside stadiums, occasionally with hilarious effect.
The deluge of ads has been highly effective. An estimated 26% of all U.S. adults wagered on the Super Bowl this year, spending 35% more than in 2023. The sheer volume of commercials for sportsbooks has also made it impossible to watch sports without being prompted to bet, contributing to a rapid increase in gambling addictions, especially among young men. Connecticut’s problem gambling hotline experienced a 91% increase in calls in the year after the state legalized sports betting, while nearly 20% of similar requests for help in New Jersey come from people under the age of 25. Failure to act quickly will lead to a public health crisis.
But thankfully, much like the stock market and its strict disclosure policies, there is a model that can show us how to solve the rapid increase of gambling addiction: cigarettes.
The United States’ war against cigarettes is one of the greatest public health victories in modern history. Cigarette use is at an all-time low, with adult cigarette use falling from 45% to 11% in just 70 years. As late as 1964, doctors were still advising pregnant women that it was safe to smoke, while cigarette use was permitted on planes until 1990.
Through a combination of federal health research, class action lawsuits, and restrictions on when and where people could smoke, the government chipped away at cigarette use. But no action is as effective at reducing cigarette use as advertising bans.
If you’re under the age of 53, you’ve never seen a cigarette commercial on television or heard one on the radio. Tobacco manufacturers are prohibited from sponsoring athletic events, giving out free samples, and intentionally marketing to minors, while all nicotine products require warnings about the product’s addictive potential. sportsbooks are utilizing all these strategies and more, and the gambling warnings are read at 500 words per minute or displayed in a two-point font.
As for my initial complaint about the shocking accessibility of sports gambling, this is the hardest issue to solve. Restricting sports betting to in-person only would push users back to the unregulated offshore casinos, and a return to full-scale prohibition is neither feasible nor desirable. Shrinking the pipeline of new gamblers by banning media partnerships with gambling companies and curtailing advertising for sports bets is a more obvious starting point.
However, my final suggestion would be to bring back prohibition for one specific type of gambling. Live bets, which are those placed during a contest that is already in action, are the most compulsive form of betting. When every pitch, snap, or possession is presented as a new opportunity to win money, the entire game becomes a series of poker hands.
Banning live bets, an idea supported by the NCAA and at least a few elected officials on Capitol Hill, would prevent gamblers from constantly returning to their book throughout a game, reducing the overall frequency and volume of betting. But by leaving standard pre-contest and end of season bets in place, Congress can avoid running afoul of the Supreme Court by attempting to return to the only-in-Vegas days.
I am glad sports betting is legal. During the holidays when I visit family in New York, I enjoy placing small $5 or $10 bets on games in which I otherwise would have no rooting interest, for the potential to win a whopping $4.80 can turn a Thursday Night Football matchup between the Jets and the Browns from a snoozefest into a thrilling affair.
But sports betting in its current form is an unchecked monster ravenously consuming the bank accounts of young men across the country. Rather than let the books create millions of new addicts through incessant ads, dubious media partnerships, and dopamine-chasing live bets, we should learn the lesson cigarettes taught us decades ago and implement regulations today to benefit us all tomorrow.
Things I Recommend This Week
The rarest move in chess | Paralogical (YouTube)
The Last Gamble of Tokyo Joe | Chicago
Cold War in the Desert | Vice
Crash Course | The New Republic
The Sky Thief | Rolling Stone
Happy Halloween! What are you wearing as a costume this year?