2025 Opens With Hating on Sports Betting

The holiday season is a great time not to following world news.

You'd be forgiven if you didn't catch this week's opinion pieces on the state of sports betting in the United States.

The Washington Post featured an opinion piece entitled "Opinion | Legalizing sports gambling was a terrible bet"

It's behind a paywall but here's the gist of it:

"With societal ills and sports scandals on the rise, Congress should rein in the betting industry."

Something tells us sports betting will be the last thing the new congress will have on their mind in 2025, but who knows?

Perhaps it's one of the few issues those on both sides of the aisle can get behind.

Sports betting, much like the legalization of marijuana, has been very much a state-focused initiative. 

And the states are doing their part in some key areas, like cracking down on college player performance prop bets, to the point where we can see well over half the states that currently regulate sports betting eliminate this type of wagering.

Hady Mawajdeh and Sean Rameswaram of Vox offered their own piece featuring the headline "Sports gambling should have stayed in Las Vegas" with the opening line reading "Online sports betting is bad for sports — and for gamblers".

The article is accompanied by a DraftKings graphic.

The authors do have a point. Advertisements for sports betting companies like DraftKings continue to flood the airwaves.

Ads for online sportsbooks like BetMGM, DraftKings, or FanDuel are ubiquitous, whether on social media or while you’re watching a game — and they all offer some amount of free money for your first wager.

During pregame shows or on sports podcasts, you’ll hear the odds for every contest; you’ll hear about prop bets, like whether LeBron James will be the first player to score for the Lakers against the Warriors on Christmas Day; and you’re likely to hear about risky, multistep bets called parlays that could turn a $25 wager into $237,553.

The explosion of sports gambling into the zeitgeist is the result of a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that undid a nearly nationwide ban on gambling on competitive sports. Since that ruling, sports betting has been legalized in 38 states and the District of Columbia, and the American Gambling Association reports that the American sports betting industry posted a record-high in revenue with $10.92 billion in 2023; according to a recent poll by Seton Hall University’s Stillman School of Business, more than one in three Americans have at some point placed a bet on sports.

Imagine growing up in an environment where sports gambling ads appear nearly as much as pharmaceutical commercials.  Once you turn 18, you'll be shooting up on Wegovy and Skyrizi in between placing sports bets. 

The only thing more prevalent than sports betting and pharaceautical ads are those commercials for Quick Hit Slots.