Eight years ago this month, the U.S. Supreme Court opened the floodgates for state-by-state sports betting. And sports leagues that hated gambling for decades eventually learned there’s gold in them thar apps.
That gold comes with a price.
The Wild West age of legalized, legitimized, and heavily monetized gambling has created a generation of folks for whom the ubiquitous DraftKings and FanDuel ads are no different than commercials for Coke and Pepsi.
It’s normal. It’s cool. If you do it, you’ll be cool, too.
And you’ll win.
So they do it. And they do it some more. And they do it some more. For some, the dopamine rush creates an addiction. Those addictions are a direct result of the fact that it’s now as easy to make a bet as it is to send a text.
The broader moral and ethical issues have taken a back seat to the rush for cash. For the leagues that have been finding ways to horn in on the treasure chest, it’s impossible to wash their hands of responsibility for the damage done by addiction.
That’s why the NCAA shouldn’t shun Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby. Without the explosion of quick and easy gambling, he wouldn’t have gotten addicted to it.
He undoubtedly was. Via USA Today, the legal filing submitted in connection with the effort to regain Sorsby’s eligibility to play college football acknowledges that his betting habits included Romanian soccer, Turkish basketball, and the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.
Sorsby, like other gambling addicts, wanted the action. The rush. Of winning, and of waiting to find out whether he’d win.
As his lawyers have argued, there’s an inherent hypocrisy. The NCAA makes money from gambling, and the NCAA prevents its players from engaging in it. (There has been an effort to soften the rules, because the sportsbooks would love to take as much of the players’ NIL money as they can.)
While Sorsby’s case shines a light for now on the NCAA, other sports leagues should do some soul searching. Their effort to rake in free money has contributed to the creation of a real public-health problem. More and more kids who are bombarded with the phony-baloney notion that betting equals winning will find out the hard way that: (1) they can’t win; and (2) they’ll potentially end up with an addiction.
Sports leagues that rely on the general public for their money (either directly or through taxpayer funding of stadiums), their attention, and their loyalty owe a duty they have, to date, glossed over. They’re facilitating, and profiting from, a mechanism that will ruin the lives of some of their customers.
And for what? The sports leagues make plenty of money from gamblers watching games. There’s no requirement that the sports leagues try to drink from the firehose of free money flowing from the suckers who have deluded themselves (due in part to the advertising) into thinking that they can win.
The sports leagues could, if they choose, continue to do what they’ve always done while shunning gambling entirely. The NFL, for instance, despised gambling when it was legal only in Nevada. The fact that it’s now legal in most states didn’t compel the league to change its position — or to allow team owners to acquire up to five percent of any company that operates a sportsbook.
That’s true for all sports organizations. For now, the NCAA will become the focal point of a problem that, on its face, shows hypocrisy.
But there’s a far deeper problem lurking. It will only get larger and larger as more people allow the gambling apps on their phones to bury the hook deeper and deeper into their wallets. By fueling the notion that it’s not only a normal aspect of being a fan but a key piece to the overall experience, the sports leagues have chosen stuffing their coffers over giving a shit about the people who have a passion for their products.
It’s not just the sports leagues. Most media organizations have been grabbing the bag without batting an eye. Maybe it’s time for everyone who has been blindly saying “yes” to the new revenue streams from legalized betting to take a step back and ask themselves if they’re comfortable with what they may be doing to those they serve.
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