It’s my favorite time of year. Spring is here, but I’m talking about the NBA Conference finals. Much like spring allergies though, there is one drawback: The incessant bombardment of sports betting advertisements that befoul the game. Unlike those annoying election commercials, there’s no end to these.
I’ve been around sports gambling all my life. I’m the only one of my contemporaries who followed the 1972 Miami Dolphins undefeated season. Why? My Dad had money riding on those games, so we watched them all. When he won, he lavished us with new shoes, dinners out, and other extras that made a kid feel special.
In Catholic grade school, raffles, tip boards, and other games of chance were the primary entertainment at our Fall Festivals, our school’s biggest fundraiser. In 7th grade, each student from our two classes brought in a bottle of booze with the Indiana tax strip still intact, and our Moms created two bushels of booze to raffle off. The line for that raffle surpassed the line for the end-of-day school pick-up.
It’s still one of the most creative school fundraisers I’ve ever heard of. Can you imagine something like that happening today without CPS getting involved?
Gambling was hardly in the shadows when I was growing up, but we weren’t bombarded with it 24/7. The ubiquity of sports gambling has grown exponentially since the 2018 Supreme Court decision Murphy v. NCAA that made sports betting a state’s issue. Currently, 38 states and the District of Columbia allow some form of sports betting, most of it conducted online through sportsbooks like FanDuel, DraftKings, and BetMGM.
Sportsbooks, a euphemism for bookie, rake in billions of dollars each year on commissions made from bets placed on these sites. In 2024, DraftKings alone generated $4.7 billion in revenue, up from $3.7 billion in 2023, according to the stock market research site TipsRank.com.
They’re not the only ones cashing in. States amass billions in tax revenue, and the leagues like the NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL, have sponsorships with sportsbooks that also generate massive revenue streams. That’s why the announcer of your game is probably hawking one of these sites while also reporting on the game. There’s nothing like a massive pull from each end of the funnel.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Marketplace and researchers from the University of Bristol, England analyzed sportsbook advertising during seven NBA and NHL games in 2023. They reported that 20% of what fans watched was sportsbooks advertising. These ads are impossible to get away from because even the courts and the ice are emblazoned with sportsbooks logos. "It's shocking the amount of gambling-related messages that bombard the audience when they're just trying to watch a game," said Jamie Wheaton of the University of Bristol.
I’m one of those fans who wants to watch her games uncorrupted. When I saw my beloved Milwaukee Bucks in person last year, my sister and I sat behind some odious fans, who discussed how many free throws a certain player had to miss in order to cover their points spread. I was disgusted! What kind of fan bets against their own team?
Plenty, apparently. A study conducted by the University of California San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute and the UCSD School of Medicine, which was published in Journal of the American Medical Association in February, noted dramatic increases in searches related to problem gambling since the Murphy decision.
In the study, researchers analyzed aggregated data from Google search terms like “gambling”, “addict”, “addiction”, “anonymous”, and “hotline” and found a 23% increase in these searches from the Murphy decision through June 2024. They noted approximately six to seven million searches related to problematic gambling nationally, peaking at 180,000 monthly searches. The consistency of these search numbers across eight different states indicates this cannot be due to chance alone.
The proliferation of sports gambling ensnares players at both the pro and collegiate levels. Last summer, South Bend Tribune reporter and my friend Tom Noie chronicled the Notre Dame Men’s Swim Team gambling scandal that took the team—in his prophetic words— from “national championship contenders to a national cautionary tale.”
The harsh but warranted action of Notre Dame Athletic Director Pete Bevacqua, who suspended the program for the 2024 season, hopefully halted the progression of pathological gambling in these young men, who like Pete Rose generations before them, made wagers involving their own team.
The UCSD study authors recommended mitigators to keep sports gambling from becoming addictive. These include increasing awareness of and resources for the treatment of problem gambling; regulating advertising, as is the norm for tobacco and alcohol ads; limits on bets made with credit cards; age and wager limits; and training and data sharing for healthcare professionals to help recognize and treat problematic gambling before it rises to the level of addiction.
For many, sports betting is fun, but for others, especially those with a history of addiction, it can quickly escalate into something more insidious. Easy money is an illusion; the house always wins. Losing money, secrecy, and shame are all signs of problem gambling. Help is available through the National Problem Gambler Hotline at 1-800-GAMBLER.
Music: "Human" by Rag 'n' Bone Man
