Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rust and president of NC Family, and each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. And now here's the host of Family Policy Matters, Tracy DeVett-Griggs. Thanks for joining us this week on Family Policy Matters.
In the first two years after North Carolina legalized sports betting in our state, North Carolinians waged $13 billion on sports betting. Not only that, nowadays it's commonplace for college athletes to receive angry posts on social media or even death threats from bettors who lost money on their performance.
Well, investigative reporter Danny Funt has spent years researching and analyzing the effects of sports gambling, and he just released a new book entitled Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling. Funt has been covering sports, sports betting, and politics for years. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and now, yay, on family policy matters.
So, welcome, Danny Funt. Thank you so much for having me. All right, so first of all, provide some perspective on how we even got here.
Sometimes my husband and I, we're looking at each other. Other as we're watching these ads, you know, come on non-stop between games, and we're like, How did this even happen? How did it happen? It happened in a blink, and I think that's one of the most important parts of this story. Is you'd think a decision as momentous as legalizing sports betting across the country and especially allowing people to do it on their phones, where with a few taps you can place a bet at any hour of the day.
You'd think that would merit a robust national debate about the pros and cons of such a decision. And yet, I think by design, this was sprung on many Americans very quickly. Where for a century, the commissioners of professional sports and college sports were so emphatically opposed to the spread of gambling and spoke about it in near biblical terms as far as it being an evil that would destroy their sports if made accessible. And then around 2018, all of that changed. And the superficial reason is the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on bookmaking outside Nevada that had been the law since 1992.
And that allowed states like North Carolina and a few dozen others to enact sports betting laws that allowed either online betting or land-based betting in a few cases. The deeper story that I get into in my book is there were meetings behind the scenes with the leagues and the representatives of the gambling business. And at the time, this was controversial because the leagues were fighting in federal court to preserve that law. But behind the scenes, behind closed doors, they were taking meetings where representatives of the gambling business explained why this would be so valuable to the league's bottom line. The long and short of it is the money was just too good to pass up, and they very quickly abandoned those deeply held beliefs about the dangers that can accompany gambling.
Wow, all about the money. Let's talk a little bit more about this 2018 decision by the Supreme Court because we know the Supreme Court is supposed to interpret laws that are already on the books. Does the federal government then not have the stomach to address this in a law that will actually have some teeth? It's a great question because, as so often happens when the court strikes down a law, clearly if Congress wanted to just rewrite the law so that it would be constitutional, they could, but there's rarely that political will after the fact.
So the case gets misinterpreted. And that's a really important thing to clarify because people remember that 2018 decision and they think the Supreme Court legalized sports betting or they said Congress lacked the authority to tell the states what they could do about sports betting or they were deciding whether sports betting would be a good thing to be legal across the country. None of that is true. Really, all the Case did was revolve around a pretty obscure 10th amendment question related to states' rights. And oddly enough, the 1992 law had said that if states had banned sports betting at that point, they weren't allowed to amend those laws or reverse those laws and now legalize it.
It was sort of a backwards way of telling states what to do. And the court said in that decision, this is a step too far as far as intruding on states' rights. But Congress could simply say sports betting is illegal or sports betting is illegal outside of Nevada. It was that strange way of doing it by preventing states from updating laws that they already had through their state legislatures that was the constitutional problem. And yet, so many people who stood to cash in on gambling took that as cover to say, well, the courts reached their decision.
This is just our new reality. And we might as well get used to it. And that was quite disingenuous, but they used that cover to then push so many states to legalize as quickly as possible and to do so in a way that was ultra-favorable to these sports betting operators and in such a hasty way that they didn't have time to consider the various consumer protections that allowing an entirely new form of gambling might seem to demand. And that's why we are where we're at today. Right.
So you mentioned already how valuable this is to the networks and to the leagues. How big of a deal is this to them and why was it so enticing? I would say the main thing that got their attention was the leagues and to a lesser extent college sport, their biggest money maker is TV rights, selling the right to show their games. And you hear about these multi-billion dollar deals that a given league will ink with, you know, NBC, CBS, ESPN, now all the streamers. And they were really worried about the value of that asset long term because they saw people canceling cable subscriptions, people not wanting to sit through a three or four hour game, their audience getting older in general.
And they worried about what that would mean for their biggest money maker, these TV rights. And the gambling industry shrewdly commissioned studies that demonstrated that gamblers watch a lot more games. The average fan more than double in the case of the NFL. And they demonstrated that they watch till the ends of blowouts, whereas a normal person might have said, ah, this game has been decided. I'll move on with my day.
Gamblers want to see how their bets will end up, even if it goes beyond who won or lost. And so, in the case of the NFL, which is the most popular league to bet on in America, these studies estimated that between the direct revenue that the league would see from partnerships with sports betting companies and maybe more importantly, the indirect revenue from making their TV audience so much more glued to the television, the NFL would make more than $2 billion every year if gambling were legalized across the country. And even by the NFL standards, that's an incredible amount of money. At the time, the average value of a franchise, the league would be making that money every year. And I spoke with a lot of people in those meetings.
And in those rooms making those kinds of decisions. And they just said, yes, the NFL for a long time was the staunchest opponent of the spread of gambling for a lot of pretty persuasive reasons. But when they saw those numbers and they saw how it affects the big picture of their business, they just couldn't say no. And like most get rich quick schemes, a lot of times there's a very ugly underbelly.
So can you talk about that? What is it like for people that used to watch sports for fun and now are just enthralled in this betting world? Yeah, there's a lot to that. And I'll get into the nitty-gritty of it. But I asked someone who was a key representative of the gambling industry meeting with the leagues.
And I said, gosh, that must have come up, right? You know, the threat of addiction and all the other health problems that gambling can create. And I remember she said, well, with reward, there's risk, right? I thought it was a very flippant way of brushing off that concern. And it's a real concern, and we're seeing why.
Because for decades, doctors and other medical experts have recognized gambling as a full-fledged addiction, potentially. It's actually the only agreed-upon addiction that isn't substance-based gambling. And from so many people I've talked to, it's one of The most brutal addictions because it's an invisible one. You know, you don't smell gambling on someone's breath. And for that reason, people around a problem gambler can have no idea they're dealing with that issue.
I even spoke with people recently who lost a staggering amount of money betting online and they're just doing it at every waking minute, but so subtly that in one guy's case, his wife had no idea until he came clean. And that was frightening to me, the idea that the person closest to you would be totally oblivious to an absolutely devastating disease you're dealing with. You know, traditionally, it was thought that maybe one or two percent of the U.S. population was at risk of a gambling problem.
Now there are experts in North Carolina that think that number could be six or eight percent among young men who are the target demographic for this. It seems that there's evidence that it's even much higher. One in five college students have dipped into their college. Tuition money to pay for gambling. It's an incredible ratio.
And I've heard a lot of alarm about the rate that college students suddenly are gambling, and even much younger. In North Carolina, half of the phone calls to the problem gambling hotline are now coming from parents who are so concerned about what they're seeing in their kids, about how they're suddenly consumed with gambling. I spoke with experts in our state who told me about elementary school students, if you can believe that, developing gambling problems.
So it's undeniable that this is a potential public health crisis in the making. I say undeniable from people who are objective about the state of things. The gambling industry refuses to acknowledge that sports betting can be addictive, which is just crazy when you think about it, to be that stubborn about a consensus fact about one of the main risks that comes with gambling. And when I hear That it really makes me skeptical that they're taking the interests of customers seriously and their well-being seriously if they're going to deny that basic point. In the past, gambling has always been location-specific, but how do you get away from it now?
Are there any safeguards in it at all? That's such a fundamental point, and yet it was lost on a lot of lawmakers who are being pushed to legalize so quickly. Two in particular come to mind: Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio, who now says legalizing sports betting is his biggest mistake as governor of Ohio. Charlie Baker, who was governor of Massachusetts when they legalized sports betting, I think this was around 2022.
Soon after that, he became president of the NCAA and spoke with so many college athletes and students in that role. And he was just immediately worried about what the country, including Massachusetts, had done by making it so easy to bet on your phone.
Now, 95% of bets, by the way, take place online.
So this is the main way people engage with sports gambling. And Charlie Baker just told me, somehow it didn't occur to him that. If you can place a bet versus having to go to a casino or even find a street bookie, you know, someone taking bets illegally. The trouble that goes with that is just a totally different equation than if you're betting on your phone and can deposit money with a couple taps and place bets constantly. The other thing that strikes me about that is it allows such a frenetic pace of betting while you're watching games.
And that was one of the big draws for the leagues because again, they're thinking about how can we keep people engaged when they're watching on TV. And if you can be banging out bets on a minute-by-minute basis, that was very appealing to them. But to a lot of health experts, it evokes a slot machine, this idea of just hammering away on your phone as you're watching and betting in this frenetic pace. And I posed that to an executive who develops these so-called micro bets, the kind of bets I'm talking about, where you're betting on, you know, will the next pitch in a baseball game be a ball or a strike? Things that granular.
And I said, What do you make of this concern that that's a road to compulsive behavior? And he interrupted me and he said, Sticky. Sticky is how we like to think of it, that it's an especially sticky product. And I get that. That's how business people talk about, you know, making your tech irresistible.
But I think sticky sounds an awful lot like a compulsive activity. And again, that has a lot of health experts really worried. Danny Funt, I feel like we've hardly gotten started. Can you join us again next week and let's talk about this a little bit more? Of course, there's so much to get into.
I'd love that. We have been talking this week with Danny Funt. He is the author of a new book called Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling. Thank you so much for joining us today on Family Policy Matters. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters.
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. And check us out on social media at NC Family Policy. Thanks and may God bless you and your family.
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