Sports media’s relationship with sports betting leaves college athletes in the crosshairs

Sports betting, like any vice, comes with its fair share of controversies. This is especially true in college sports, as many states are striving to ban prop bets on collegiate competitions, and even more so coming on the heels of a recent NCAA study.

According to results published earlier this month, “angry sports bettors” make up at least 12% of online harassment aimed toward college athletes. This abuse peaks in March during the annual March Madness tournament, with 80% of online abuse received during this time, and disproportionately impacts female athletes, who receive 59% more abusive messages than men. 

According to Dr. Declan Hill, an associate professor at the University of New Haven in investigations, just as the nature of harassment has changed with technology, so has the process of gambling. Whereas sports betting used to be much more taboo and even illegal, it’s now more accessible than ever. 

“What is happening now is that people are walking around with the equivalent of two dozen casinos in their back pocket,” he explained. “That is what you do when you’ve got a mobile phone.”

The ease of gambling due to technology is what Hill calls “frictionless gambling,” or gambling that takes place without traditional barriers. Whereas bettors used to have to pay entry fees, know a bookie, and pay in person with cash to bet on sports, technology makes gambling easier. So, too, is developing a gambling addiction. 

According to Hill, these obstacles aren’t “going to stop  a devoted gambling addict, but there is a certain hindrance to it. You know, you have to look in the bookie’s eyes as he’s placing the cash down or taking it out or more likely paying him or her over and over. So there’s a certain hindrance to that. Now, of course, there are no humans. You’re simply pressing buttons on your mobile phone.”

The digital nature of gambling also sets athletes up for online harassment. Although Hill notes that all athletes are susceptible to harassment from disgruntled bettors, collegiate athletes are particularly so. Just as sports gambling is more accessible thanks to phones, it’s easier than ever to find and harass college athletes, both online and in-person. 

And while technology has changed, Hill notes that gamblers’ attitudes have not.

“I’ve never met a gambler who lost money because he thought he was stupid,” Hill said. “It’s always somebody else’s fault. And it’s either the referee or it’s the league or to a number of them, it’s the players. So there’s all kinds of that from the very low level incels on social media, but there have been attacks, there have been all kinds of abuse, including physical abuse of athletes around the world thanks to this.”

Complicating matters further, Hill adds, is the fact that college athletes, and male athletes in particular, are a subgroup of gamblers who are particularly prone to gambling addiction for a variety of reasons: “Everything that makes an athlete good at what they do–obsessive behavior, never giving up, chasing odds, overturning impossible odds–makes them fantastic athletes and really, really lousy gamblers.”

For some lawmakers, the obvious solution to this bleak landscape is to place restrictions around sports betting. For example, the Ohio Casino Control Commission recently banned prop bets on college athletes’ individual performance. At the federal level, the Supporting Affordability and Fairness with Every Bet Act, proposed by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), seeks to ban advertisements via gambling operators during live sporting events and between the hours of 8:00 AM and 10:00 PM. 

But according to Derrek Helling, assistant managing editor of PlayUSA.com, there are important benefits to sports gambling partnerships in the broader sports media space, and increased regulation isn’t always the answer–nor is it always feasible. Because sports media itself also shares a symbiotic relationship with sports gambling affiliates, and detangling the two isn’t always as simple as it seems.

“A lot of outlets that cover sports have either sold advertising to or done some kind of partnership with online gambling companies,” Helling explained. “To either promote their ads to promote their products and or just promote a sponsor.” 

He added that because sports media comes in so many different forms, from digital media to podcasts to television, the reach of sports betting in the sports media space is broad and deep.  

“There isn’t a whole lot of corners of the sports media landscape that sports betting hasn’t touched anymore. And so you might find yourself on a sports website and reading about a betting preview for the game and the site that you were actually on is not really a sports site, it’s a gambling site.”

However, Helling emphasizes that, in spite of the prevalence and risks associated with sports betting, it does have its brighter sides. Not only do sports betting sites help fund sports media, because of the way sports betting sites are set up, sports betting helps promote undercovered sports and athletes, like NCAA men’s Olympic sports and women’s sports.

“If the bets are available, obviously, that is something for gambling affiliate media and other media companies to make content about,” Helling said.  “And because [of that], there might be people searching for information about that specific wager or ways to bet on a specific athlete. And organic search is still the majority of the way that we in the affiliate media space get our traffic. So I would say that if such markets are not available, that content isn’t going to exist because the media companies aren’t going to spend the money on making it.” 

For Helling, cutting down on advertising is not going to solve the problem of gambling addiction or online harassment of college athletes. Helling compares this situation to cigarette advertisements. 

“People still smoke. People still bet on sports, and some people are still gonna have an issue with gambling even if you completely ban all advertising for it. This is a problem that you can outlaw away, and I hope that a lot of legislators and regulators across the country realize that.”

However, for Hill, the difference between gambling and other vices like cigarettes, alcohol, and hard drugs, is that, while people know those are harmful and potentially addictive, the same awareness doesn’t exist around sports betting – especially for college athletes. 

“Imagine going into a bar and somebody handing you drugs or a drink or tobacco or whatever,” he said. “At least you know it’s addictive. But the education programs for most NCAA athletes are woefully inadequate.”

Hill, however, isn’t proposing a mass ban of sports betting – it’s here and it’s here to stay. However, he believes that measures must be taken to ensure clarity and consistency surrounding its regulation. 

“I think it’s a very good idea that it is legal,” Hill said of sports betting. “But what I think is needed–and I’m joined by bipartisan consensus of politicians in Washington, by most of the sports leagues–is that we need federal regulation across this great country from Alaska to Florida, Hawaii to Maine, where it’s clear what’s going on and what the regulation is. And at this moment, we don’t have it.”

Hill notes that, “some states, to be fair, have done it very, very well. They’ve got the taxes right. They’ve got all kinds of consumer protection and addiction stuff, but others, they’ve just essentially established the wild west. And so there needs to be proper regulation about it.”

Helling, too, doesn’t support banning sports betting, but for other reasons. According to Helling, even in states where sports betting is illegal, consumers can still gamble on sports through unregulated markets. He knows this because he’s seen it happen before.

In 1992, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which outlawed sports betting in all states but Nevada, became law. The law was eventually declared unconstitutional in Murphy v. NCAA, when the state of New Jersey questioned the constitutionality of restricting economic trade via gambling restrictions at the federal level. A key pillar of the ruling was that PASPA didn’t prohibit sports betting as intended. Rather, it prevented important regulatory oversight in the industry and pushed bettors to get their gambling fix through unregulated markets. 

Helling agrees that blanket bans like PASPA puts bettors at a heightened risk for scams and stigma, which could prevent them from getting help for gambling addiction.

“Even if you put sports betting back in the back of the black box and banned it again across the country, people aren’t gonna stop doing it,” Helling said. “And that’s just gonna cut back on the number of resources that are available for the people who do struggle with it.”

However, the side effects of sports betting aren’t just issues that should be swept under the rug. Sports betting isn’t going anywhere soon and both Helling and Hill believe measures can and should be taken to reduce the harmful effects sports betting can have on consumers while still giving sports media and underrepresented athletes access to its perks.

“One thing that I would really like to see happen more often in sports media and gambling media is telling the stories of people who struggled with problem gambling and got treatment and were able to recover,” Helling said. “Have all the jurisdictions require all the ads for the sports books and the apps to have information available to where people can reach out to and available resources that exist.”

In addition, Helling has a more controversial idea for sports media: acknowledge the risks of sports betting even though sports media directly benefits from it economically. But he also notes that the benefits to jurisdictions should be acknowledged. 

“It puts a gambling companies in kind of a bad light in that we’re making [sports betting] available and that’s harming people,” he acknowledged. “But I guess to the same extent, the other information I would bring into that conversation is the resources, that these regulated gambling companies are making available at their expense, both voluntarily and because the law requires them to. And just the benefits that gambling taxes provide the jurisdictions.  The unregulated sector of gambling, which is just as available, does not provide those benefits. And so we can’t lump them all in the same category in that regard.

And, instead of politicians working to ban sports betting, Helling suggests they divert their resources to helping gambling addicts. Helling notes that this looks like “more investment from jurisdictions in resources to provide treatment. for such people to make sure that they’re able to access [resources] completely free of charge–and that it’s readily available in their communities, regardless of their socioeconomic status, regardless of their ethnicity, that it’s available. Easily.”

Hill has perhaps an even more controversial idea for sports media: 

“[Sports media] have to decouple themselves from sports gambling companies,” Hill said. It’s a walking, talking conflict of interest. So media companies should decouple themselves with gambling companies.”