Nearly $10K later, here's what a Latter-day Saint writer learned after year of online sports betting

OREM — Over the course of a year, McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic, blew nearly $10,000 betting on sports on his phone.

While the money was provided to him by his publication as part of his reporting assignment, Coppins' nose dive into the world of online gambling took a definite toll on him.

"The gambling was starting to occupy more and more of my mental space. I was listening to gambling podcasts in the shower. I was watching five football games at once every Sunday. Four on the TV, split screen, one on my phone. At one point, my wife caught me checking DraftKings at church, which did not go over well," Coppins, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said. "I would routinely stay up after midnight, scrolling through these apps, looking for my next bet."

Coppins on Thursday paid a visit to Utah Valley University, where he talked about his one-of-a-kind assignment and what he learned from his year-long journey.

'Most bizarre assignment of my career'

At first, his editor's pitch seemed normal. Timely, too.

After all, the rise of online sports gambling has seen a meteoric surge since the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn the federal ban on sports betting in 2018.

In 2017, Americans wagered about $4.9 billion legally. By last year, that total reached at least roughly $160 billion, with over 90% of the bets being placed online, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Ask anyone who watches sports, and they'll tell you it's impossible to follow any major professional league without constantly being fed gambling content.

"Turn on any game now on any channel at any time of the day, and you are bombarded with ads for sports betting apps. Shaquille O'Neal, Kevin Hart are hawking bonuses on DraftKings. Charles Barkley is shilling for FanDuel. Hall of Famers, who a generation ago would have been selling sneakers and Wheaties, are now getting paid millions of dollars to persuade people to download gambling apps," Coppins said.

But it's not just retired athletes and celebrities. The NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB have all struck lucrative sponsorships and licensing deals with the likes of DraftKings, FanDuel and more.

With all that in mind, it seemed like a straightforward story to Coppins. Until his editor told him he thought it would be made stronger if he himself actually participated in sports betting.

"I remember sitting in that meeting and saying, 'Yeah, I can see that. I take your point, but I'm not really a gambler. And in fact ... I don't gamble for religious reasons,'" Coppins said. "And he said, 'Yeah, no, we know. That's what makes it so great.'"

So, in what Coppins described as a "theological loophole," The Atlantic gave him $10,000 to gamble throughout the 2025 NFL season. The magazine would cover Coppins' potential losses, and if he won, profits would be split evenly.

Coppins met with his bishop and, after a conversation that ultimately led to him receiving the go-ahead, downloaded the DraftKings app.

"The last thing I remember him telling me in that meeting was, 'Be careful,'" Coppins said. "I kind of shrugged him off in the moment. In retrospect, I shouldn't have."

'Artificial rooting interest'

Coppins described himself as a football fan who, for the most part, primarily tuned in for his favorite teams' games. Now, despite being a stranger to the expansive vocabulary of sports gambling, he found himself placing bets ahead of the NFL's opening night.

"Under normal circumstances, I probably would have half-watched the game while sending emails or folding laundry and fallen asleep in the fourth quarter," Coppins said. "But for a couple hundred bucks, I had essentially purchased an artificial rooting interest in a game that I otherwise would have no reason to care about. It was exciting. It was fun."

When the game ended, Coppins tallied his bets and discovered he had made $20. The next morning was the first sign of how a spiral can happen, with Coppins and his wife doing math to get an idea of how much Coppins could make throughout the experiment.

"This was one of the first things gambling did to my brain. Within about 12 hours, I had transformed a $20 profit into a hypothetical kitchen renovation," Coppins said.

As is usually the case with sports gambling, Coppins didn't maintain his $20-per-game pace, and things came back to earth after the initial highs.

So, Coppins consulted well-known statistician and gambler Nate Silver to get a better idea of the arena he was operating in. He asked Silver what he'd have to do with his $10,000, over the course of the season, to be considered a "respectable sports bettor."

"He said, 'No, McKay, you don't understand. If you win one penny, that would make you better than 98% of people over an entire season.' He wasn't exaggerating," Coppins said.

Lessons learned

Eventually, after placing a bad bet on a Thursday night game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Detroit Lions, something in Coppins snapped.

He began feverishly and recklessly trying to recoup his losses over the past four months by placing bigger and riskier bets.

By the time the Super Bowl rolled around, Coppins had devised a master plan to win back the thousands of dollars he'd lost by putting everything he had left on the New England Patriots beating the Seattle Seahawks.

Lacking even a blaze of glory, the Seahawks defeated the Patriots 29-13, thus ending Coppins' gambling journey at a total loss of $9,891.

"Sitting there that morning, the money wasn't really the thing that frightened me the most because really it wasn't my money, right? What bothered me was that I wanted to keep going," Coppins said.

Despite an intimate understanding of the industry gained over months of interviewing gambling addicts, sportsbook executives, influencers and psychologists, the urge was still there.

Coppins knows he's far from alone in this urge, and while he didn't give in at the end of the day, many do. Much of this, he thinks, can be attributed to what he describes as the "casino-fication of America."

"For most of American history, we have fences around gambling, sometimes literal ones. You had to go somewhere — a racetrack, a casino, Las Vegas. There was friction. Now, practically overnight, we've taken an ancient vice, put it on everyone's phones and made it as normal and frictionless as checking the weather," Coppins said.

Coppins noted that his point isn't that betting $20 on a game here or there will ruin somebody's life, but that if people are going to gamble, they should understand the game they're playing.

"You're betting against companies with armies of statisticians and enormous quantities of behavioral data. You're betting against software designed to remove every bit of friction between an impulse and a wager. You're betting against influencers whose livelihoods depend on convincing you that you're different, smarter than everybody else," Coppins said.

Meanwhile, the gambling industry, Coppins added, has placed "a very large bet" on this generation.

"It has bet that it can put a casino in your pocket, surround you with advertising, make gambling indistinguishable from sports fandom (and) you'll keep playing even as you lose more and more money," Coppins said. "It has bet, essentially, that you're suckers. You get to decide whether they're right."

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