NOTE: A source appeared in the original draft of this under the condition their name is not used beyond the classroom. This source will appear as “First Last” here.
First Last knows that the odds aren’t in their favor.
The 22-year-old engineering student brushes off this inclination anyway, as they’re excited to put together a basketball parlay that could pay them up to $2,000 — which’ll help replace their recently-totaled car.
Of course, it took only one bad spin from a basketball and their parlay flopped; Last’s money sent off into the void where DraftKings — an online sports betting company — made over $1 billion in the fourth quarter of the 2023 fiscal year.
Last was left in the dust with nothing to show for it. However, as someone who has bet on sports for four years, they understand this bad parlay was not an anomaly.
Last was betting on sports illegally from 2020 until mid-2023 when they turned of legal age to bet online, in accordance with New York State’s laws surrounding online sports betting. This practice wasn’t legalized until January 2022 for anyone over 21 years of age.
“It’s producing bad habits for these people,” Last says about the culture surrounding sports betting. “There’s no such thing as free money, you’re always paying in the end. The house always wins.”
They would not solicit the total amount of money they’ve used to place bets the past four years, but they say they’re barely in the net positive.
Last was one of many Americans who wagered $119.84 billion on sports in 2023, according to the American Gaming Association’s Commercial Gaming Revenue Tracker. They also found that of the 38 states that legalized the practice (including the District of Columbia), 28 saw the highest annual figure of wagers in their states’ history.
Scott Engel, a Fantasy Sports Writers Association Hall of Famer, who has reported on fantasy sports (where people draft a team from a pool of real players against their friends) and sports betting for The Athletic, ESPN, and RotoBaller has seen this growth since the late 1990s when sports betting was completely illegal.
“I think it’s good for it to be legalized and out in the open now. It makes being a fan more fun and rewarding,” Engel says. “At the same time, we will need to see regulations implemented over time to preserve the integrity of the games and to streamline the partnerships with leagues to prevent any damaging fallout.”
The “integrity” of the game is a principle that has been thrown around since betting on the major North American professional sports leagues slowly started to seep into the mainstream in the 1990s via offshore accounts and local bookies.
Take baseball player Pete Rose for example.
He has the most career hits in Major League Baseball history, 17 All-Star selections, three championships, and a Most Valuable Player award under his belt. A sure-fire Hall of Famer, right?
No. Rose placed multiple bets on his team to win games in the 1989 season, and was banned for life from the league after an investigation.
Even this week, the National Basketball Association handed out a lifetime ban to one of their players, Jontay Porter, for allegedly wagering around $55,000 on games he participated in and giving a bettor insider information that would have resulted in a $1.1 million payout had Porter not been investigated.
“But what about Jason Kidd? He beat his wife. He’s in the Hall of Fame. What about Karl Malone? He impregnated a 13 year old. He’s in the Hall of Fame. Where was the integrity of the game then,” Ethan Hartley, a 24-year-old broadcasting student says.
Professional sports leagues have always come down hard on players who are involved in betting controverses. The question then becomes, what does that tell the fans? It’s all about the money, maybe?
The National Football League makes $2.3 billion annually according to the American Gaming Association, and also boasts partnerships with DraftKings and FanDuel — both online sports betting platforms.
The National Basketball Association also has partnerships with both aforementioned companies, and recently introduced live betting lines to their League Pass platform — which has seen annual growth rates of up to 50% since its inception 12 years ago as the predominant way to watch non-nationally televised games.
“Wagering is more out in the open and not frowned upon as it used to be,” Engel says about how betting could grow the popularity of the sports they are attached to. “We are actually being blitzed more than ever with advertisements and content, yet it has rather comfortably fit into the consumer experience.”
He pointed to how fantasy sports was seen as “Dungeons and Dragons for sports geeks” during its inception, but is now nearly a $10 billion industry.
This argument that this new way to enjoy sports can bring in both hardcore fans and casual fans is one that has seen record viewership for the National Basketball Association and National Football League since the legalization of online gambling in 2022 — the two major North American sports leagues that have embraced betting the most.
While this correlation might not equal causation, there’s no debate about how in-your-face these two leagues have been about betting on their product. It will take time to see the effects of this, being the newest trend to hit the sports world.
Likewise, there’s no denying that gambling addiction is real, but it will take time to see if sports betting becomes a generational trend for Generation Z — the generation most targeted by betting companies due to their comfort with technology.
For now, sports betting remains an industry marred with legislative and moral question marks.
