Being a student-athlete has easily been one of the best choices I made during my college journey, but there’s one thing I can’t do that I have always been intrigued by: sports betting.
According to official NCAA policy, student-athletes are not allowed to gamble or bet on any intercollegiate, amateur or professional athletics competitions.
With that being said, I get enough enjoyment out of watching a good competition without betting on it. I don’t need to get money involved in my viewing experience, especially when it comes to teams I care about, like the Detroit professional teams and the Ohio State University athletics teams (yes, I know that’s weird).
We live in a world where sports betting has become much more popular and commonplace on social media. With my current status as an NCAA athlete, I unfortunately can’t even try out gambling for this article, but I can at least learn about it.
How Sports Betting Became Legal (Again)
Upon googling “sports betting for dummies,” I came across a jobsinsports.com blog post detailing pretty much everything someone would need to know if they wanted to get into sports betting. I understand how sports betting works to an extent in the way of money lines, spreads, parlays and over/unders, but a quick refresher never hurts.
Money line bets are essentially just picking who you want to win in whatever competition you are betting on. Spreads are point differentials, like when a team is called a 14-point favorite or something like that, so you would be trying to bet on the favorite or the underdog depending on your beliefs.
Over/unders are somewhat similar, but they are more objective. They provide a scoring total for a certain game, and you’re just betting on whether or not both teams will reach/surpass the total or not.
Parlays are the outlier here, as they are essentially a combination of bets that all need to hit in order to win. This could be like having one player catch a touchdown, another rush for 100 yards, and another catch an interception in a football game.
I also found information that was new to me. For example, I didn’t know that in 1992, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) was put in place, banning sports betting in most US states. In 2018, Murphy v. The National Collegiate Athletic Association led the US Supreme Court to rule PASPA unconstitutional, leaving individual states to determine sports betting legality.
While I remember sports betting becoming legal, and having seen the explosion of its popularity since the ruling, I didn’t know all the details, so this was very interesting to learn.
Sports gambling in Michigan picked up right away, with Governor Gretchen Whitmer legalizing it with her signing of the Lawful Sports Act in December 2019. Retail or in-person betting was introduced in March 2020, but online sports betting wouldn’t be legal until January 2021.
There are 12 sportsbooks available in Michigan, including ESPN Bet, FanDuel Sportsbook and DraftKings Sportsbook.
Who is Betting, and On What?
According to a Birches Health article from February, 49% of the country gambled on a sports game in the past year. The NFL is the most popular league to bet on, according to the same article.
39% of sports bettors are under 35, and 69% are male. As a member of those demographics, I still don’t feel the need to put money into something I enjoy for entertainment. Nevertheless, I see a lot of advertisements.
From FanDuel’s off-putting commercial featuring Eric André to BetMGM’s series of Jamie Foxx advertisements, they’re all over the place and are honestly getting annoying. Promoting something so expensive – and possibly addictive – so prevalently seems dangerous.
Speaking of gambling addictions, the rates weren’t as high as I thought they would be: 1% of American adults have a severe gambling addiction, and 2-3% suffer from a mild gambling addiction.
While this number doesn’t seem scary right now, I’m almost certain that it will grow in the coming years. An NBC news article details a rise in calls to gambling addiction centers since 2018, right when PASPA was deemed unconstitutional. For example, Ohio’s Problem Gambling Network received a 55% increase in calls within just one year of sports betting being legalized in the state.
How Do the Brits Feel About Betting?
In an effort to gauge how people my age feel about sports betting, I reached out to my lacrosse team. I asked them to vote anonymously on whether or not they would bet on sports if it was legal for them to. Out of the 19 teammates who answered, 14 said they would and five said they would not.
While this is a very small population, I think it says at least something about the level of interest in sports betting with people my age.
To be completely honest, I can see sports betting becoming a problem if people aren’t careful, but that is completely up to them.