WashU Expert: Sports betting is ‘all around us, all the time’

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down federal gambling restrictions, holding that regulatory power belonged with the states. How did this affect sports betting?

Gambling on sports is nothing new. Sports aren’t pre-scripted. We love and engage with these stories, in part, because we don’t know the ending until it happens.

In the early 2000s, you might hear an announcer get unreasonably excited by something that didn’t really matter to the outcome of the game — a late, garbage-time touchdown, say. And it would have been taboo to explain how that affected a betting line. The viewer had to be attuned. They had to be in on the joke.

With the rise of internet spaces, and then social media, you began to see people explain what was happening. Still, to be part of the action, most people had to go to Vegas, or find an offshore betting site or have an illegal bookie. There was friction. You had to really want to gamble on sports. Some people got addicted, some people ruined their lives, certainly. But the barrier to entry was much higher.

Today, betting is almost frictionless. You just go to the Apple or Android store and download the apps. These apps often come with enticements — free money for your first few bets. The companies know once people start, many aren’t going to stop.

FanDuel launched in 2009. Draft Kings launched in 2012. Both began as fantasy sports sites. How did that DNA shape their pivot to gambling?

Fantasy sports allow you to focus on individual athletes. You compete by identifying who you think is going to do best on a given day. You choose a sport or a contest, make your picks, and those picks are weighted in certain ways.

That was the entry point. People got used to prognosticating not just about winners and losers, but about particular athletes or particular stat lines within particular games. People got attuned to thinking about those things. Now they can gamble on them. The sites look and feel very similar.

“Prop” or proposition bets – bets on specific events within a game, rather than just the outcome — have played a key role in recent betting scandals. What’s the danger there?

This is where corruption comes most easily. We saw that with prop bets around whether (Guardians pitcher) Emmanuel Clase would throw a ball or a strike. If you’re a pitcher in the major leagues, throwing a ball or a strike is something you can pretty easily manipulate. More so than winning or losing a game.

We’re now in the midst of March Madness. In January, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in eastern Pennsylvania charged 26 people with fixing NCAA and CBA men’s basketball games. What lessons do you draw from those indictments?

These were mostly players at smaller schools, in games that not a lot of people were paying attention to. It was Division I, but not high-profile college basketball powers. The nature of the bets was different in different cases, but according to the investigation, players were taking amounts from $10,000 to $30,000.

What’s interesting to me is that this happened within the landscape of NIL (name, image and likeness) contracts. Some college players have NIL valuations in the millions. That might dampen the possibility of corruption for elite players on elite teams. But if your deal isn’t as good, and you see what other people are getting, maybe you think, ‘How can I get a little more?’

College athletes should be able to make money from their own names and likenesses. I certainly favor that. But once you’re making deals, maybe a deal for gambling purposes doesn’t feel quite as illicit as it would have under the old system.

Your scholarship focuses on fans and fandoms. How are these big structural changes — like NIL and online betting — reshaping the fan experience?

There’s this idea that fans just root for the jersey. I would argue that, even when that’s true, fans still want to know who they’re rooting for as human beings —especially in the age of social media.

Transferring used to mean sitting out a year. It was difficult to do. That’s no longer the case. You can transfer after a season and play the next year. And with more than 300 NCAA D1 teams, there’s always the possibility that you’ll get a better NIL deal somewhere else.

So rosters have become really fluid. Even if you’re a fan of a prominent team, at the start of the season, you may not know most of the roster. This matters for gambling because I think gambling is a way to get fans reinvested. When you put money on a game, there’s an extra reason to care.

The gambling companies all know this. Watch the ads. They often emphasize that, if you lay money down, it’s a lot more exciting. So if free transfers, shaped in part by NIL deals, work against fan investment, gambling is a way to push it back up. It’s a countervailing dynamic.