Online Gambling Corrupts Sports—And Americans, Too 

Sports events have always attracted betting. The more prestigious the level of play and the event involved (say, the Super Bowl and World Series) the greater the wagering.  

But the Supreme Court disastrously crossed a red line in the 2018 case Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association. In it, the Court ruled that the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, which prohibited states from sponsoring, advertising, or “authoriz[ing]” sports gambling, was unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated the “anticommandeering” doctrine that the Court had previously read into the Tenth Amendment. That is, since the Tenth Amendment states that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” the 1992 Act unconstitutionally dictated to state governments the limits of their powers. (Coincidentally, the Court first enunciated its anticommandeering rule in an unrelated case during the same year that the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act was enacted.) 

On purely textual grounds, there is reason to doubt the correctness of the anticommandeering doctrine, since as the great constitutional scholar Walter Berns pointed out in a 1962 essay titled “The Meaning of the Tenth Amendment,” the Tenth Amendment, read literally, is  just a tautology: it says that the powers that the Constitution doesn’t delegate to the federal government are thereby reserved to the states and/or the people, without specifying just what those powers are.  

In fact, as is well known, since at least the late 1930s, federal courts have consistently adopted an extremely broad view of Congress’s powers under the Constitution, especially when it comes to domestic spending and regulation: consider the extensive volume of New Deal legislation that the Supreme Court upheld starting in 1936, along with Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” which authorized the establishment of entire cabinet departments that are nowhere mentioned in the Constitution; Obamacare; and Joe Biden’s egregiously mislabeled “Inflation Reduction Act.” But while the Murphy decision hinged on a somewhat arcane distinction between the federal government’s authorizing or prohibiting a particular mode of conduct and its imposing the burden of such a prohibition on the state governments, subsequent events have demonstrated the imprudence of that decision. Among those harms are an explosion of publicly advertised sports betting: many of the ads during televised sports events are sponsored by gambling companies like Draft Kings and FanDuel, duping people who can ill afford to lose substantial amounts to do just that. Each ad is accompanied by a 1-800 number that problem (that is, addicted) bettors can call for “free help.” (What if cigarette ads were once again posted on television, accompanied by the counsel, “Got lung cancer? Call for free help!”)  

According to the American Gaming Association (“gaming” being the preferred euphemism for gambling), the (legal) sports betting industry took in $13.71 billion in 2024. Additionally, the legalization of sports gambling has encouraged the promotion of so-called “prop” bets, offered throughout game broadcasts, in which gamblers are invited to wager on such things as the number of hits a particular player will get, a pitcher’s number of strikeouts, etc., odds on which keep changing during the game. Such bets open the door wider to outright corruption, as in the case of two Cleveland Guardians pitchers who were suspended late in the 2025 season for allegedly throwing a particular pitch into the dirt on purpose. (Slight intentional “errors” like that are particularly hard for authorities to detect, since they are unlikely to affect a game’s outcome.) 

Meanwhile, under pressure from Congress, the National Basketball Association has recently launched an investigation into corrupt betting schemes involving players from several teams. Prop bets can easily be combined into “same-game parlays,” long-shot wagers that depend on more than one event occurring in a game. But although professional leagues have tried to limit prop bets, such efforts face the difficulty, according to the Wall Street Journal (for instance, here), that they are the most highly profitable form for “sports books,” as well as being highly popular with bettors. One NBA player has already pleaded guilty to tipping conspirators off to bet the “unders” on his stats in two games, then removing himself early from the games to live up to the promise.  

The Courts Worsen the Problem 

But the Court made matters still worse through its 2021 decision in NCAA v. Alston, in which it upheld a district court ruling that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)’s rules limiting education-related compensation to student athletes violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. Soon after the decision, the NCAA voted to allow student athletes to receive commercial payment in exchange for use of their name, image, and likeness. The result has been a bonanza for college athletic stars, many of whom now enter a “transfer portal”—sometimes more than once during their college career—in pursuit of a better coach or more successful program so as to enhance their chances of earning higher name-image-likeness (NIL) compensation. (According to Fox Sports, during the 2025–26 season, the twenty-five highest-paid college athletes—all football players—were scheduled to receive amounts ranging from $2 million to $6.8 million.)  

And in yet another judicial ruling, last June, U.S. district court judge Claudia Wilken approved a $2.8 billion settlement of a suit by college athletes allowing NCAA Division I schools to pay their athletes directly. The agreement includes provisions for revenue sharing, enabling schools to distribute funds—in addition to NIL earnings—directly to their players, with an initial cap of approximately $20.5 million per school starting in the 2025–26 academic year.   

Of course, such practices raise a question: how can any college instructor reasonably expect athletes in his class to put much emphasis on homework or test preparation, considering the immediate financial rewards that come from his athletic endeavors? And how can students, in general, feel the sort of identification with their college’s team that they formerly did, when its members’ attachment to the college is based largely on money and may not last more than a year? Why not just hire a group of young pro athletes to “represent” the school, without any pretense that they are students?     

As the New York Times recently reported, colleges themselves, notably big-power public universities, are feeling the financial pinch. In 2023, when North Carolina legislators legalized sports betting, they “dedicated a chunk” of the revenue they anticipated deriving from a tax on such betting to the support of the state’s public university athletic programs—with the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State University excluded (as not needing support) from the expected $2 million initial pool. A year later, the NYT recounts, athletic directors at nearly all of Louisiana’s Division I athletic programs met to discuss a growing financial problem: how to afford payments to student athletes amid rising costs for such needs as travel and health care? Meanwhile, the story continues, “[a]s gambling addiction rates have soared across the country,” advocates for treatment programs have seen their hopes for funding through taxes on betting in that state frustrated. In a “compromise,” lawmakers in sports-friendly but tax-averse Louisiana agreed to raise the state’s tax on online betting revenue to 21.5 percent. But “just 3 percent of the revenue—the same as before [the increase]—has been set aside for problem gambling treatment and outreach.” Nonetheless, Louisiana’s move is viewed by the NYT as the likely start of a movement in other states like Kentucky, North Carolina, Michigan, and Indiana that have large college sports fan bases who demand that their teams remain competitive.  

 

It isn’t hard to see the long-term effect of such tax increases on the character of sports betting. Just as high tariffs (as Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist no. 35) encourage smuggling, so high taxes on legal sports wagering will induce savvy (and not-so-savvy) bettors to turn to illegal routes. Just recently, prosecutors brought charges against fourteen people in New Jersey, Florida, and Rhode Island for raking in $2 million from an illegal, Mafia-related online betting scheme. Meanwhile, however, in the lamest of excuses for the danger that widespread betting addiction might “break up families and break up homes” and cause the loss of jobs, the athletic director at Louisiana Tech—whose school has committed to paying its athletes $1.3 million this year (far from the maximum) to keep its school “competitive” as it moves to a more highly ranked conference—explained, “That’s what makes this country great: Everyone has a personal choice and personal freedoms to do whatever they feel fit.”  

Is this the understanding of American liberty and greatness that his school’s faculty are teaching their students? As my rhetorical question is meant to suggest, the legalization of sports betting, especially at the college level, is a corruption not only of athletics and of education but of American society in general. No one, after all, compels a young person to attend college just to engage in an athletic activity that earns money for his school. (NBA rules were liberalized decades ago to allow highly talented high school graduates like LeBron James to enter the league directly, without attending college at all. And other players who want to sharpen their skills without the burden of college increasingly play for professional leagues in Europe and elsewhere, before applying for the NBA draft.) In any event, since only a small minority of those who play sports for Division I schools will ever become professionals, why not encourage them to take advantage of their athletic scholarships (which cover room, board, and personal expenses as well as tuition) to engage in serious learning as well as play, thus preparing themselves for non-athletic careers in the future?  

While America is indeed a country based on freedom, its leading statesmen, clergymen, and educators from the time of the founding have recognized the need for its institutions and policies to guide citizens in directions that dispose them to use their freedom in ways that are salutary for themselves, their families, and their country. No one seriously contends that Friday-night poker games among friends, or modest betting on horse racing on actual visits to the track, are likely to interfere with that goal. But pushing sports fans to waste their money continually, just by pressing a button, on compulsive, high-stakes gambling is probably not what the founders had in mind. Lawmakers, educators, and high-court judges and justices: please take note. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.