Sports betting: Winners, losers? Let good times roll for fans, Risks to college athletes: players, teams and politicians Game fixing, point shaving
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On Sept. 26, 1981, I was lying on the living room floor of my parent’s home watching the University of Southern California play Oklahoma in a much-anticipated college football game. Leading up to the game, I made several bets with my football teammates that USC would beat OU. Since I lived in Oklahoma and I was 15, it was easy to find people who were willing to place a bet. USC won, and I spent the next few days collecting my cash. John Locke would have been quite proud of me. In 1690, Locke — one of the philosophical architects of American politics — wrote, “A liberty to follow my own will in all things where that rule prescribes not, not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man, as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of Nature.”
Locke understood the fact that, as free human beings, it is simply nobody’s business if people decide to take part of the fruits of their labor and gamble on sports.
Sports gambling in America is a nearly $5 billion industry, even with the near unanimity among state legislatures in banning this market.
Politicians have discovered that no written law ever triumphs over the laws of supply and demand. From the era of Prohibition to the current war on drugs, we see that as long as profits can be earned and consumers are available, someone will find a way to supply us with what we want.
Now that the Supreme Court has opened the door to legal gambling, free markets will spring into action.
Recently, NBA owner Mark Cuban commented that legalized sports gambling will double the value of professional sports franchises.
Imagine the changes that could take place in the arenas and stadiums across the country. We will see gambling kiosks throughout stadium concourses. It will also make sense to retrofit stadium seats to provide touch-pad technology that allows people to gamble from their seats on everything from the score at halftime to whether a player will make his next free throw. Of course, it also makes sense for teams to make cellphone apps available to gamble remotely.
Politicians should be celebrating as well. Among people who are passionate about gambling on sports, the demand for sportsbook services is inelastic. This gives state governments the opportunity to impose taxes on a per-wager basis or on gambling income. This new tax revenue would allow state governments to shore up their budgets and spend on initiatives they deem necessary.
The state of Florida already does this with our version of legalized gambling known as the lottery. If gambling tax revenue would be added to lottery money, we might hear a lot less about critical shortages of revenue for everything from heightened school security to our over-burdened infrastructure.
Critics, of course will charge that legalized sports gambling will promote addiction, financially decimate families and ruin people’s lives.
What the economic moralizers always miss is the fact that there is already a thriving black market from which addiction can form.
Las Vegas — and the chance to financially ruin your life — is a flight away.
Moreover — and perhaps most important — it is also a fact that we have, as free citizens, the natural right to be stupid with our money.
In 1849, Frederic Bastiat summed up this whole gambling argument this way:
“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”
Let the gambling begin. COMMENTARY |
The Supreme Court made history last week when it decided that the federal government did not have the authority to regulate or prohibit sports betting through the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 and that any action to do so was unconstitutional. The power now rests in the hands of state officials to legalize gambling on sports at both the professional and collegiate levels.
This decision is extremely worrying and has the potential to harshly affect the well-being of NCAA student-athletes across our country. These athletes may find themselves targets of increased external pressure to fix outcomes or pass along private team information to gambling organizations operating in their respective states. We know from history that collegiate athletics programs can be easy targets for local bookies and that the NCAA is no stranger to dealing with issues of game fixing. It is important to have the perspective that this recent decision to grant states free rein over sports betting may substantially increase this external pressure for studentathletes to give in to gambling-related crime.
Since the point-shaving disaster involving The City College of New York in the early 1950s, the underground market of sports gambling has disparately impacted our nation’s student-athletes when compared to those playing professionally. This is a direct result of the substantial increases in professional player salaries and endorsement deals. In the 21st century, professional athletes have enough of a financial cushion that protects them from becoming reasonable targets for fixing scandals.
Student-athletes, on the other hand, continue to be the main targets for gambling crime. Since the 1950s, we have seen young people at prestigious educational institutions such as Tulane, Kentucky, Boston College, Northwestern, Arizona State, San Diego State and Toledo face criminal convictions because of point-shaving scandals. In present day, many of these individuals are already voicing their frustrations with the lack of compensation as their names and likenesses are used to drive massive amounts of revenue for the NCAA. This public display of dissatisfaction, paired with the upcoming growth in state-sponsored sports gambling, can be the perfect storm to create this generation’s first gambling disaster in collegiate sports.
The risks for student-athletes do not stop at game fixing and point shaving. As mentioned in my 2006 book, “New Game Plan for College Sport,” research from the 2003 National Study of Collegiate Sports Wagering and Associated Health Risks found that over onethird of male student-athletes engaged in some type of sports-wagering behavior in the past year. The book also mentioned that the three main contributing factors to the growth of collegiate sports betting were increases in the acceptance of gambling, access to point spreads, access to sports handicappers and internet gambling.
Now, in 2018, these pressures have clearly grown. When I was writing my book, the massive surge in daily fantasy sites such as DraftKings and FanDuel had not even occurred yet. These sites make it even easier for student-athletes to gain access to potential career-ending activities. If student-athletes already feel taken advantage of and revenue opportunities like securing a part-time job would render them ineligible for competition, they may try to participate in online gambling or daily fantasy in an attempt make money on the side.
Ultimately, student-athletes may find themselves in trouble with the NCAA and face ineligibility sanctions that range from a oneyear ban to the permanent loss of eligibility in all sports.
I ask that our state leaders take note of the incredible ethical issues behind this recent decision to make sports betting legal and familiarize themselves with the inherent risks to student-athlete well-being. We cannot continue to put our nation’s student-athletes at risk and need to act to ensure their safety throughout this new venture.