Some thoughts on the normalization of sports gambling

It's important we have these conversations with what it's done to the sports media industry.

Roughly three years ago, in 2021, I got a bit hooked on sports gambling.

I had recently moved from one state where it wasn’t legal at the time (Texas) to another where it was (Michigan) and I now had the ability to place bets on my phone, whenever I wanted.

And it was bad. I wasn’t losing a ton of money, I never put more than a $100 into the app at the time, but I was checking it all the time on dumb little $5 bets that I had no real knowledge of.

I had really weird hours then, my son was only a year old, and there would be times after getting him to fall back to sleep at 3 in the morning I’d place a $5 bet on some Turkish soccer match where I knew nothing about either team.

After breaking my own self-imposed rule of not putting more than $100 into the app in a month, I deleted it and thankfully haven’t placed a real bet beyond playing some blackjack at the casino since then.

I’m telling you this story, not because I had some gambling problem, but I understand how quickly and easily someone can get sucked up into what sports betting has become.

Sports betting companies are now a huge part of sports media. The money they generate helps keep some of my good friends and colleagues employed at various publications, and it was a hot topic of discussion this week when the formerly Bally-branded regional sports networks became Fan Duel Sports Networks.

Now, Bally was always a sports gambling company, so we’d already crossed the threshold into this space. But the re-branding to “Fan Duel Sports Network,” is an aggressive reminder that we aren’t going back.

If you watched the NHL’s Frozen Frenzy on Tuesday like I did, flipping from game to game, you probably saw the influx of sports betting ads on various networks. And the messaging makes it sound easy, place a simple “no risk” $5 bet here or there, analysts make their picks against betting lines now and we’ve completely normalized something that was once taboo.

There are now tons of accounts on social media committed to showing ridiculous parlays that hit, where someone bet $10 to win thousands, which sports books are willing to happily pay out because for that one winner — if it’s not a photoshopped ticket — they now generated at least a dozen more bettors who think, “hey, I could do that too.”

I started thinking about this even more because I got an email this week from a sports betting company asking to do a “guest post,” on this site which would have included a link back to a sports betting site. They would have paid for it, but wanted it to look as “organic” as possible.

The ask didn’t sit right with me. I’m admittedly open to a sponsor or advertisement on this site (hey, I’d love a coffee sponsor!) but the thought of normalizing sports gambling here, at a place I actually control and love, just felt wrong.

Like anything, when I dive deep into something in my mind, I have to research a bit more. It’s both a gift and curse in this space, I can’t just let something go. Thankfully there was a pretty good podcast this week over at Ethan Strauss’ site where he spoke to professional sports gambler Eric Rubin.

HoS: Eric Rubin, Pro Sports Gambler

It’s a pretty good deep dive in how the industry is built to get you hooked, and that once you actually start winning, the sports books will effectively limit how much you can win with wager limits. This is why we say the house always wins.

In that podcast Ethan and Eric also bring up a conversation about the money and how this is driving sports media now, how an industry that has struggled is actually creating slightly more jobs because of money or opportunity because of sports wagering.

And that’s a really slippery slope. One of my contract jobs has a sports gambling sponsor, that’s money that’s helping employ a friend and colleague. Another good friend works for a company that has gotten deep into sports gambling and his entire livelihood is better off because of that deal.

It’s also not a black-and-white situation, sports gambling, in my view isn’t this completely evil thing. It can be fun if you do it responsibly, but it’s also not this soft-and-friendly thing that sports media has effectively normalized in recent years through both necessity and the quest for more #content.

It’s also clouded an industry that is supposed to be built on honesty. When a so-called big J “journalism” company is pushing picks and wagers to a sponsor — or a sports book they have naming rights with in the case of ESPN — it’s no longer about informing or even entertaining a reader, it’s about finding a way to get them hooked.

Sports are also chaotic and unpredictable, I would never bet on hockey for example, and based on my body of work I am a slight “expert” in that space.

I just think these conversations are important, because we’ve become so numb to it. I can’t scroll through a social media site right now without being reminded I should place some 12-team parlay and you can’t watch a broadcast without being reminded that right now, depending on where you are, the casino is right in your pocket.

It’s not a moral high ground for me, if you want to gamble on sports and have fun with it, go for it. But as someone who got semi caught by that casino in my pocket and works in an industry where it’s never going away, I think it’s important to have these conversations about how it has and will shape sports coverage.