How Sports Betting Swallowed the Game

It's Friday, September twenty-fifth. I lost ten dollars on sports betting last night. The Green Bay Packers got blown out on Thursday Night Football, and neither of my bets hit. Five dollars on Prize Picks — that's the player props app, where you bet on whether a specific guy goes over or under his stats — and five dollars on Kalshi, which is a prediction market. Somehow that's legal. Last Sunday, a couple of my bets came through. Last night, nothing. I wouldn't call myself a bettor. I dabble, once in a while.

But here's the thing: what I did in thirty seconds on my phone last night would have been illegal in most of the country until 2018. That year, the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting. Now thirty-nine states and DC have legalized it. Americans bet one hundred sixty-seven billion dollars last year. The industry made nearly seventeen billion in revenue — more than the NBA makes in a year, more than the NFL and MLB combined. The same leagues that spent decades treating gambling like a threat to the existence of sport now have official betting partners, studio shows sponsored by DraftKings, and odds updates built into the broadcast. In less than a decade, sports betting went from illegal in most of the country to the financial backbone of how we watch games. The money is staggering. The scandals are already here. And nobody knows where this ends. For most of American history, sports betting was confined to Nevada and the black market. That changed in May 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in a case called Murphy versus NCAA. New Jersey had been fighting for the right to legalize it for years. The Court agreed. The floodgates opened.

The numbers since then are hard to comprehend. In 2025, Americans legally wagered one hundred sixty-seven billion dollars on sports — an eleven percent increase from the year before. Revenue hit a record sixteen point nine six billion. For context, that is more than the NBA's annual revenue. It is more than the NFL and MLB combined. Sports betting alone is now a bigger business than every professional sports league in America.

Thirty-nine states and DC have legalized some form of sports betting. New York, Illinois, and New Jersey are the biggest markets. State governments collected three point two billion dollars in tax revenue from sports wagering last year. That is a lot of roads and schools funded by people losing parlays on Sunday afternoons.

And the thing that really changed everything is the phone. Twenty-six states have legalized mobile betting. You don't have to go to a casino. You don't have to call a bookie. You pull out your phone, open an app, and within thirty seconds you've bet on the next play, the next quarter, whether a specific player will hit their points over. The friction between having a thought and placing a bet on it is effectively zero. Here is the problem with an industry this big and this accessible: the incentives to cheat get enormous. And the scandals have come faster than most people realize.

In April 2024, the NBA banned Jontay Porter, a forward for the Toronto Raptors, for life. The league found he had disclosed confidential information about his own health to known gamblers, then intentionally limited his minutes in at least one game to hit the under on his prop bets. Before one Raptors game, an associate placed an eighty-thousand-dollar parlay bet on Porter to underperform. It would have paid one point one million dollars. The bet was frozen and never paid because the sportsbooks flagged the unusual activity.

In October 2025, the FBI unsealed an indictment involving more than thirty people — including Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, former NBA player Damon Jones, and an active NBA coach — in a scheme to use insider information for fraudulent bets. Prosecutors allege Rozier faked an injury during a 2023 Hornets game so that co-conspirators could bet the under on his statistics. The indictment described connections to Mafia families running rigged poker games on the side.

In college basketball, a Department of Justice investigation revealed a point-shaving ring that ensnared dozens of players across multiple programs. One player at Iona, Adam Njie Jr., told a bettor he would throw the first half of a game against Rice, then backed out. The bettor lost fifteen thousand five hundred dollars and threatened him with physical harm. Njie transferred twice. The NCAA ruled him permanently ineligible in June of this year.

Since 2018, at least twenty-three professional players or coaches have been suspended or permanently banned for sports betting violations. That number is going up. And these are just the ones who got caught. Here is the other side of this: what the advertising is doing to people.

DraftKings spent roughly five hundred million dollars on sales and marketing in 2020, then another four hundred million in the first half of 2021 alone. In the Philadelphia media market, gambling companies spent thirty-seven million dollars on ads in just the first nine months of last year — more than any other city in the country. If you have watched a sporting event in the last three years, you have seen the commercials. Kevin Hart. Jamie Foxx. The same message every time: this is fun, this is normal, the first bet is risk-free.

The National Council on Problem Gambling found that the risk of gambling addiction in the US rose thirty percent between 2018 and 2021 — the exact window when legalization and advertising exploded. Nearly twenty million Americans reported problematic gambling behavior in 2025. Seven million people are estimated to have a gambling disorder. Helpline calls have exploded: Virginia saw a nine hundred seventy-three percent increase between 2019 and 2023. New Jersey reported a two hundred seventy-seven percent increase since legalization. Among New Jersey males aged eighteen to twenty, the gambling addiction rate is roughly ten percent — more than triple the national average of around three percent.

In May, a Senate subcommittee held a hearing on the impact of sports gambling. Senators heard testimony from Harry Levant, the director of gambling policy at the Public Health Advocacy Institute, who said he gets about a dozen emails every week from people who are desperate for help, themselves or a loved one. He said every single one of them had the same thing in common: pain. Legislation has been introduced to ban gambling ads during live sporting events, following the model of the 1971 law that banned cigarette ads from television. It has not passed. I lost ten bucks last night. I was going to watch the game anyway. That version of this — the casual five dollars on Prize Picks, the five dollars on Kalshi — is supposed to be the harmless one. And I am also in pick'em leagues with my friends, a Survivor league with my buddy Todd, another one with friends from San Francisco. These are fun. They are social. Nobody is ruining their life over a ten-dollar buy-in with their buddies.

But the line between all of that and what the industry is selling is getting harder to see. The leagues that once banned Pete Rose for life for betting on baseball now put the odds on the screen during the broadcast. The sportsbooks are not sponsors. They are partners. The incentives are not hidden. They are the product.

And here is the thing: you cannot have it both ways. You cannot run a one-hundred-sixty-seven-billion-dollar gambling industry and expect the integrity of the games to hold. The more money flows through betting, the more pressure there is on the people inside the game — the players, the referees, the coaches — to nudge outcomes just enough to make a bet pay. Most of them will resist. Some of them won't. And the ones who don't have a phone in their pocket with an app that makes the whole thing take thirty seconds. Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you Monday.