It’s football season in America: that marvelous time of year when there’s a chill in the air, leaves on the ground and hours of high-flying, ground-pounding excitement every weekend. Fans like me wait all year to root for their favorite team and share in their successes and failures. But if you’ve watched any football recently, or any of the four major American sports (football, basketball, baseball and hockey) for that matter, I bet you’ve noticed a new trend.
Sports betting has dominated the discourse on American sports. You see it everywhere, from the non-stop stream of TV commercials advertising sportsbook promotions—bet $5 and receive $300 in bonus bets!—to the insides of the stadiums themselves, plastered with the logos of different sportsbooks. After the recent high-profile arrests of NBA coach Chauncey Billups and player Terry Rozier on betting-related charges, it’s in the news, too.
Rozier is accused of informing a childhood friend that he would fake an injury and remove himself from a March 2023 Charlotte Hornets v. New Orleans Pelicans game in the first quarter. His friend then gave this information to bettors, who netted thousands of dollars by betting the under on his point total for the game. Billups, a former NBA Finals MVP and member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, is alleged as part of a separate case to have worked with organized crime families to rig high-stakes poker games, defrauding players of over $7 million. However, he also perfectly matches the description of “Co-Conspirator 8” from the betting indictment, a Portland Trailblazers coach who, before a March 2023 game against the Chicago Bulls, informed a friend that he would be sitting his best players. This crucial knowledge was then used to place approximately $100,000 worth of bets against the Trailblazers.
Sports betting isn’t new—it’s been ingrained in American sports since the beginning. For much of American history, horse racing and boxing were the most popular sports, largely due to their close ties to gambling. In the early 20th century, baseball was rocked by the Black Sox Scandal, when Chicago White Sox players conspired with gamblers to purposefully lose the 1919 World Series. For decades, betting happened in back rooms, bars, casinos and offshore sites. You could bet on the winner of a match or take an over/under on the point total of a match, but that was pretty much it. Additionally, to even place a bet, you had to either go through an illegal bookie or travel to Las Vegas.
That all changed in 2018, when the Supreme Court overturned the federal ban on sports betting. The industry has since exploded, rapidly growing every year. The four major American sports leagues—four of the five most valuable in the world—raked in $54.1 billion in total revenue in 2024. That same year, sportsbooks took almost triple that figure, $149.9 billion, in legal sports bets.
Aggressive marketing strategies, such as the too-good-to-be-true promotions featured in commercials, are responsible for a lot of this growth. But it’s not only that: the profitability of sports betting has also markedly improved due to the rise of proposition bets and parlays. Proposition bets are wagers placed on other aspects of a game, such as an individual player's performance or who will score the first touchdown. Multiple bets can be strung together to create parlays, which have very low chances of winning, but net you large returns on your wager. Setting the odds on these types of bets is tricky, so the sportsbooks can tweak the odds in their favor without the average person taking notice. The win rate for sportsbooks on legal sports betting is around 5% on average; for parlays, it’s around 30%.
Gambling is exploitative, addictive and potentially life-ruining. But the integration of sports betting into the fabric of American sports isn’t just getting more people addicted to gambling—it’s threatening the very way we relate to sports on a human level, as a reflection of the human condition.
It can be difficult to express how special sports are. To an outsider, it may seem like just 11 guys running into another 11 guys for three hours on a Sunday afternoon. If that were all there is to sports, they wouldn’t have any power over us. No, we love sports so much because sports give us stories—and they are the most gripping, heart-wrenching, exhilarating, and inspiring stories that humanity has to offer. Sports aren't merely about outcomes—victory or defeat, and the joy or sadness that come with them. They’re also about heartbreaking mistakes and glorious redemption. They’re about friendship, betrayal and revenge. They’re about overcoming obstacles—poverty, racism, disability, addiction, fate. In sports, we see society’s greatest challenges, and through sports, we are able to overcome them.
When we normalize and encourage sports betting, we risk losing this magic. Most immediately, the integrity of the sport suffers. The sports betting industry is enormous, as we saw before, and it’s naive to think that the temptation of that kind of money won’t have any effect on players, coaches, referees, and executives. We recently saw how easily this can happen in the indictments of Rozier and Billups. It seems like a victimless crime, an easy way for a star athlete to share the wealth a little. But once a player, coach, or referee is willing to manipulate a game for money, the entire foundation of the sport crumbles. There is an unwritten promise between the sport and the fans: that the game they love is fair. If that integrity is tarnished, then the competition loses all meaning.
But what’s more worrying to me is how sports betting corrupts the relationship between the fan and the athlete. Because of how narratively driven sports are, athletes are more relatable than other celebrities. For example, my favorite athlete growing up was Stephen Curry. I wore his basketball shoes and tried to emulate his shooting motion, like many of my classmates, but what drew me to him specifically was his story. Nobody thought he would succeed in the NBA because of his small frame, which was something that I, as a short, skinny fifth grader, could empathize with. He was a positive role model for me.
Sports betting takes this human element away, reducing athletes to numbers. Stephen Curry is no longer the underdog from unknown Davidson College who became the greatest shooter of all time—he’s a name on a screen, a stat line to gamble on. Instead of rooting for him to hit a clutch three or break someone’s ankles, fans hope he hits the over or under on points or assists. And no matter what he does, every game, people are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on him.
The bigger sports betting gets, the more money people lose, and the more frustrated people get—and it can get ugly. According to a U.S. News survey, 21% of sports bettors say they've verbally abused an athlete, either in person or online, after losing money on a bet. Death threats have become commonplace. The fan-athlete relationship, which used to be built on admiration, respect, and awe, has deteriorated into something hostile and transactional.
We can’t let sports betting keep tightening its grip on the sports that we love. Sports should be a place where people come together, a force that unites fans of different colors and creeds. People are always going to gamble on sports. However, our sports leagues, which represent an integral part of American culture and identity, shouldn’t be partnering with the same exploitative sportsbooks that they used to spurn. If we want to protect fans and players from the harms of gambling, we need tighter regulation that makes taking bets less profitable. We owe it to ourselves, the fans, the players, and future generations to keep the meaning of sports intact.
If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, crisis counseling and referral services can be accessed by calling 1-800-GAMBLER (1-800-426-2537)
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.