In 2018, the Supreme Court decided a monumental case, Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, which has had devastating consequences far beyond sports and betting.
The court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) of 1992, a federal law that prohibited states from sponsoring, operating, advertising, licensing, or authorizing sports gambling schemes. It didn’t legalize gambling. The decision restored the authority to regulate or legalize sports betting—including mobile and online sportsbooks—back to individual states.
Writing for the 7-2 majority, Justice Samuel Alito held that PASPA violated the anti-commandeering doctrine under the Tenth Amendment. The doctrine prevents the federal government from forcing state legislatures to enact or refrain from enacting specific laws.
A few states—most notably Utah and Hawaii—maintain strict anti-gambling laws that prohibit virtually all forms of gambling, both in-person and online. But 38 states plus Washington, D.C. permit some form of legal sports betting, with over 30 states allowing mobile/online sportsbooks.
Betting on a game’s outcome is not the problem. Most online betting houses have strict daily, weekly, and monthly limits, as long as the player “opts in.” State gaming regulations generally require platforms to offer users the ability to set personal daily, weekly, and monthly limits on deposits, total wagers, or net losses.
Once a user sets these personal limits, the platform strictly enforces them. Decreasing a limit happens immediately, but requesting an increase or removal requires a 24- to 72-hour cooling-off period to prevent impulsive betting.
But the limits aren’t mandatory. And limits don’t affect the biggest problem with online gambling: player prop bets. A proposition bet (or prop bet) is a wager on a specific, isolated event or outcome within a game that does not directly depend on the final score or overall winner of the game.
You can bet on an unlimited number of outcomes with prop bets, including game bets (which team will score first, or whether there will be a safety in a football game), or you can place bets on individual athlete statistics (e.g., whether a quarterback will throw for over 250 yards, or if a basketball player will score more than 22 points).
Most online betting houses allow in-game prop bets as well as “parlay bets,” where two or more bets are combined, leading to bigger payouts and bigger risks.
Most recent scandals of athletes being arrested for gambling-related crime involve players deliberately altering their in-game effort to meet a specific prop bet. Several players believe the betting scandals in recent years are the tip of the iceberg. It’s just too easy to get a relative or friend to place a prop bet and then play the game dishonestly in order to cover his bet.
In the age of frictionless online betting on player props, all it really takes to cheat is to coordinate with one trusted friend or family member, tell them that you’re not feeling your best before a game, subtly underperform throughout the game, and then accept in-kind gifts from that person. Sure, the authorities will catch those who do this sloppily. But how exactly will they catch a duo who carries out such a scheme in an intelligent and patient manner?
The rumors and false alarms are just as damaging as the proven crimes. Just last week, I saw rumors circulating on social media that the Golden State Warriors were engaged in the same sort of manipulated gameplay driven by player prop betting. No real evidence was offered—but that is my point. The rumors themselves corrode public faith in the integrity of sports. They contribute to a sense that everything is fixed. It’s hardly romanticizing the past to note that these sorts of rumor mills didn’t exist before 2018—or if they did, they didn’t operate at anything like the scale that they do today.
“For psychologically well-adjusted bettors, it’s an innocent hobby,” writes The Free Press’s Coleman Hughes. “But for a significant minority, it’s a dangerous vice.” A recent scholarly paper found that when a state introduces online gambling, credit scores drop an average of 12 points, and there is an increase in “indicators of excessive debt, including bankruptcy filings, debt sent to collections, credit card delinquencies, and auto loan delinquencies.”
Put simply, life as a typical sports fan was better when sports betting was illegal in most U.S. states. Even without the ability to easily and legally bet on games, we all managed to enjoy ourselves greatly, we were not driven to black markets for gambling, we were untroubled by the fear that players were manipulating their gameplay, and we were unbothered by advertisements tempting us to lose our money.
Hughes does not recommend that gambling on sports be made completely illegal. But a return to pre-2018 rules governing gambling should be looked at seriously.
Unfortunately, politicians have also become addicted. They love all the tax money flowing into their states’ coffers from the $167 billion sports betting industry.
There’s a reason American states decided to outlaw all gambling. By the end of 1910, virtually all casino and card room gambling had been outlawed throughout the entire United States—including in Nevada. The social cost of gambling in a country far less prosperous than today was too much to bear. The impact on families was especially pernicious. Social reformers, who became politically powerful in the early 20th century, viewed gambling, prostitution, and alcohol as intertwined social vices that damaged families, promoted addiction, and preyed on the poor.
We can never go back. Illegal gambling became a money-maker for the mob, making it powerful and deadly. But surely we can find a balance between total prohibition and the wild west of online sports betting today that is killing our faith in athletic competition, impoverishing tens of thousands of Americans, and causing pain for many families of addicts.
Editor’s Note: President Trump is leading America into the “Golden Age” as Democrats try desperately to stop it.
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