Press Box: You can bet I hate sports betting

Kyler Gilliam, Contributing Writer

Both the NFL and College Football are gearing up for the season, but a true evil is rearing its ugly head once again: sports betting.

Sports betting is everywhere, and to be quite frank I am sick of it. Every show, network and podcast has some type of sportsbook sponsorship. 

Want to learn more about the questionable Vikings secondary? You have to hear this ad for DraftKings. Want to know how Tennessee’s roster fares against a competitive SEC? Here is $5 worth of promotional credit from PrizePicks to make a bet.

Season previews are riddled with betting lines, spreads, overs and unders; I am tired. 

I want to watch preseason football content without the forbidden apple of sports betting being dangled in front of my face. 

The culture that sports betting creates enables gambling addiction, especially in young adults. Its advertisements are everywhere younger people inhabit. 

In online spaces, there is a constant reminder of how to make quick money if you can pick the right numbers on a five-leg parlay. 

The sportsbooks have made sports gambling accessible to the average person after the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018. The act restricted states’ access to legal sports betting, according to ESPN. 

The Supreme Court’s decision allowed for the states to decide how it would handle sports betting, and most states, with influence from professional leagues and investors, began allowing the betting industry into their states.

The sportsbooks have their own apps where people can gamble, instead of having to go through a bookie or casino to gamble. These apps have advertisements everywhere and there is no escaping. It preys on young adults, as well as minors who are not old enough to legally gamble.

People in their early 20s are the fastest-growing demographic of gamblers, according to the American Psychological Association.

The growth of sports betting goes further than the average consumer, it impacts the athletes as well. 

There have been many instances where professional and collegiate athletes were caught breaking rules set by professional sports leagues and the NCAA for gambling, such as gambling in team facilities or betting on their own teams. 

Former Raptors center Jontay Porter received a lifetime ban from the NBA for violating league gambling rules, including betting on his own team’s games, according to the NBA.

The culture of sports betting breeds ugliness from fans when athletes don’t reach their betting lines. Fans harass athletes on social media, blaming them for the money they gambled away. Direct messages or untasteful posts that ridicule athletes for not living up to an imaginary number that someone else placed on them are absurd. 

People are more worried about the $50 they wasted than the actual human on the other side of the screen.

Sports betting is a can of worms we will never be able to reseal. 

I don’t need to see an ESPN BET advertisement before I watch “First Take” in the morning. We don’t need more naive young adults turning into degenerate gamblers, and we don’t need athletes attacked for not playing up to an imaginary standard. 

Hopefully, this will get better, but I have a feeling we won’t. The gambling companies, the professional sports leagues, lawmakers and the influencers selling the product are making boatloads of money. The sports betting industry generated $10.9 billion in 2023, according to Sports Business Journal.

That number is expected to grow. With corporations and investors generating billions of dollars and the demographic of young gamblers continuing to populate the gambling market, this is a problem that we are just going to have to get used to.