19 Jun 2025 Make Sports Betting Fringe Again
Last summer I sort of obliquely touched on my hatred of online sports betting, but as the problem has only gotten worse and I have only gotten more disturbed by it, here is a more direct attempt: The meteoric rise of FanDuel and DraftKings is deeply problematic, and as someone who grew up in central North Carolina surrounded by tobacco fields and remembers a time before the Master Settlement Agreement, it’s not hard to draw lines between the two. We seem to be in the “More Doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette” phase of this social experiment, and if wisdom and temperance mean anything, it seems to me we should be willing to chart an alternate path, if for no other reason than the health and well-being of our children.
In our house we have just started by muting all of the incessant sports betting commercials and calling out their blatant lies about “free” betting credits. It’s not much, but we have to start somewhere!
As a parent I am of course generally interested in the moral formation of my sons. Being Christian people, that means there is a particular moral ethic that Amy and I and our church try (and often fail) to show and tell about so that Miles and Charlie pick it up over time. Obviously there are times when this particular ethic comes into conflict with broader cultural norms, and that’s fine! Most of the time we don’t think our job is to try to change the culture, as much as it is to show the boys there’s a different way of doing things based on the vows we have made.
All that to say, this blog is not some Christian polemic about gambling meant to start a crusade against the legality of sports betting or lotteries or anything of that sort. Gambling has been around as long, or nearly as long, as humans, and I don’t expect that to change. Plus, I recently won a Survivor pool with friends and thoroughly enjoyed my winnings (a meal at Waffle House which I didn’t pay for), and while I have never even come close to winning an NCAA tournament pool, I have typically enjoyed those as well.
But since 2018 the Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for states to legalize online sports betting, I would say we have a problem on our hands here. And even just a classical, non-religious examination of virtues would say we have some work to do.
The sheer scale and sudden ubiquity of FanDuel and DraftKings is staggering. In less than ten years, we have gone from this being an illegal enterprise to it being an industry where Americans spend more than they do on movies and video games combined. Nearly 40% of males 18-49 have an online betting account, and surveys have shown that 35% of those who gamble self-report some sort of gambling problem (the number is much higher for younger men and for online betting over scratch-off-style gambling). The ads we mute are nearly constant, especially when watching a sports broadcast. And what’s different from the sports betting that occurred illegally before all of this is, as Kyla Scanlon and Jon Cohen (the author of Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling) discussed on a recent podcast:
- Behavioral Design: The platforms are engineered to exploit overconfidence, dopamine, and a lack of friction – especially among young men.
- Institutional Complicity: States, media, and markets helped normalize betting not by accident, but as a way to collect revenue.
To go a step further, firms like Kalshi have figured out how to turn sports betting into “prediction markets” that are regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission rather than states, which opens the door to sports betting within the apps where your actual investments are.
What to do about it though? I think there’s probably a two-pronged approach, and yes I know I may be yelling into the void: 1) An appeal to reason, and 2) A commitment to the virtues.
Regarding the first, I don’t know that it gets much better than this killer chart from Michael Mauboussin, showing that while in the short term gambling feels kind of like investing, in any meaningful time period the differences become stark.
Regarding the second, whether your family is religious or not, placing a high value on the virtues of wisdom and temperance involves some version of, “In our family we do these things and not those things.” Not from a place of self-righteousness but from a commitment to being formed toward healthier versions of ourselves and a commitment to telling the truth. Namely, that the deck is stacked by companies and governments with vested interests in forming gambling addiction.
And maybe, just maybe, a good old-fashioned dose of the Mute button will help.
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