Bet On It? What Sports Betting Really Entails
Sports betting website. Photo by Helen Tso '29.
Since 1992, betting on sports has been illegal in the entirety of the United States. Now, it seems many states actually allow or encourage gambling. What happened? Is betting actually beneficial?
Following a major controversy over baseball player Pete Rose, the House of Representatives decided to introduce a bill called the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which was later passed and finally signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.
The PASPA banned sports betting in all states except Nevada. However, in 2018, the Supreme Court overturned the law, claiming that it wasn’t constitutional.
Since then, 39 states have legalized betting on sports, and 31 of them allow betting through apps or on smartphones. The legalization is beneficial for many states. New York, for example, has a 51% tax rate on bets made on a mobile device, making over two billion dollars, much of which has gone towards education.
However, the legalization of sports gambling does have rather negative outcomes. New York State saw a 26% increase in problem gambling-related calls to the Office of Addiction Services and Supports in 2022. Moreover, bankruptcies in these states have increased by 28% and debt that was transferred to debt collectors has grown 8%.
Recently, the NCAA has come out talking about how betting has negatively affected the mental health of college athletes and has begun to call for the elimination of player-specific prop bets in collegiate competitions.
According to the NCAA, “One in 3 high-profile athletes receive abusive messages from someone with a betting interest,” and “Across the Division I Men's and Women's Basketball Championships, over 54,000 posts/comments were flagged by Signify's AI for potential abuse or threats and reviewed by human in-house analysts.”
So, betting on different sports can not only negatively affect athletes' mental health and ways of playing, but also can lead to criminal charges, as the NBA found out on October 23. Over 30 people involved in the NBA have been charged by the FBI, making this the NBA’s second-largest gambling scandal in the past two years.
Most important in this scandal is the fact that the head coach of the Portland Trailblazers and a guard of the Miami Heat have been arrested. Head coach Chauncey Billups has been allegedly rigging poker games with the mafia and potentially sharing information with bettors, even though he is a head coach. Guard Terry Rozier is being investigated for passing along information and impacting the outcomes of games to sway bets.
Overall, we see how betting can impact not just the lives of players, but also people who place the bets. While it may be good for the states where it is legal, it does not seem to be productive for citizens of those states.