- Americans bet $3.1 billion on NCAA games in March, up $400 million.
- A Deseret News/Hinckley Institute poll shows 40% see sports betting as neither good nor bad for sports.
- Scandals and addiction concerns prompt calls for stricter sports betting regulations.
SALT LAKE CITY — Americans legally bet an estimated $3.1 billion on men's and women's NCAA tournament games this past March, up $400 million from the year before.
And while that's a big number, it's a fraction of the nearly $150 billion the American Gaming Association estimates people wagered in total on sports in 2024.
Super Bowl LIX this past February was the online sportsbook BetMGM's single-biggest betting event ever, according to the New York Post. DraftKings, another sportsbook, reported it wrote more than 12 million bets on the big game across its 2.5 million active users.
Gambling on both professional and college sports has exploded since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal ban in 2018. At least 38 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico now allow commercial sports betting in some form.
Sports betting has become embedded in American culture. Sportsbooks are now everywhere, from nonstop advertising to social media feeds to in-game commentary. It has gone from the fringes of society to mainstream.
But it also raises a number of questions. Among them: Is it good or bad for society? Is it good or bad for sports?
Morning Consult posed those questions in a new nationwide poll for the Deseret News and the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics.
The results find Americans somewhat indifferent about the impact sports betting has on society and sports.
The good, the bad and the middle
When asked, "Do you think legal betting on professional and collegiate sports is a good or a bad thing for sports?", 40% say it's neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Again, less than a third, 31%, say it's a bad thing, while 18% say it's a good thing. Another 12% don't know.
Morning Consult conducted the poll of 2,225 U.S. adults Nov. 7-13. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
"I just feel like this all happened so quickly for people that they didn't necessarily have a chance to digest what the stakes were, what the dangers were," said journalist Danny Funt, who chronicled the rise of American sports gambling in a new book titled "Everybody Loses" due out in January.
"It happened so quickly that the gambling industry and their business partners had such a powerful lobby and public platform to assure people that this was, if not neutral, actually a good thing for sports and society."
Funt said evidence of rising gambling addiction rates and dangers to public health along personal finance issues such as higher bankruptcy rates, less savings and college students tapping into their tuition fund is trickling in.
"All of these studies and research projects are creating a mountain of bad news," he said. "I would expect those figures (in the poll) to continue to skew toward more concern than optimism as time passes."
Sports betting scandals
The new Deseret News/Hinckley Institute survey came just after a gambling scandal rocked the NBA and as news broke of another one in Major League Baseball. Both call into question the integrity of American sports.
In the past few weeks, more than 50 people, including past and current NBA and MLB players and mobsters, were indicted in four separate federal and state sports gambling cases.
A case federal agents dubbed "Operation Nothing But Bet" alleges Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and five others used nonpublic injury and lineup information to place fraudulent bets on NBA games worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. In a case called "Operation Royal Flush," Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups and 30 others, including members of organized crime, were charged in schemes to rig illegal poker games.
In the baseball case, two Cleveland Guardians pitchers, one a three-time All-Star, allegedly accepted thousands of dollars in bribes to help gamblers in their native Dominican Republic win at least $460,000 on bets placed on the speed and outcome of their pitches.
On Thursday, the New Jersey attorney general charged 14 people for their alleged roles in a multimillion-dollar illegal sports betting ring that involved college athletes and had links to organized crime.
Funt said those cases didn't surprise those plugged into what's going on in sports gambling, and could be the tip of the iceberg.
"I just think the argument that it's somehow good for sports by making it easier to police and prosecute gambling-related corruption is just such a flimsy, downright disingenuous argument to me. As that sort of bad news keeps coming I don't see how anyone could hold that belief seriously," he said.
"In fact, there's so many more ways to manipulate games no matter what you're able to monitor, the risk of corruption is, as I see it, undeniably greater."
Breaking down the survey results
The Deseret News/Hinckley Institute poll generally found more younger people and men see betting as a good thing than older people and women, reaching as high as 27% among the 18-34 crowd. That age group, Funt said, is undoubtedly the target audience of sports betting companies.
Baby boomers are less tolerant of gambling on sports than other generations. Half say it's bad for society and 46% say it's bad for sports. On the flip side, fewer than 2 in 10 GenZers see sports betting as bad for either.
Broken down by political persuasion, slightly more Republicans than Democrats say it's good for society. Slightly more Republicans also say it's bad. More Democrats than Republicans, though, said it's neither a bad thing nor a good thing.
Democrats and Republicans were about the same as to whether sports betting is good for sports. But 35% of Republicans say it's bad compared to 30% of Democrats. More Democrats than Republicans say sports betting is neither a good thing nor a bad thing for sports.
Looking at income levels, 26% of people making under $50,000 a year say sports betting is bad for society compared to 39% of those earning more than $100,000 annually. The numbers were nearly identical about whether it's bad for sports.
The American sports betting industry posted record revenue of $13.71 billion in 2024, up from a record $11.04 billion the year before, according to the American Gaming Association.
"Last year saw brick-and-mortar revenue growth slow, while online gaming and sports betting continued to grow," American Gaming Association vice president of research David Forman said, per ESPN. "These past few years have reshaped the industry, and the revenue pie, while it's much bigger, looks very different than it used to. That's increasingly driven by new online gaming options available to more people than ever before."
