David Bockino, associate professor of sport management and author of the upcoming book "Over/Under: An Unexpected History of Sports Betting," reflects on how sports betting is changing fans' relationships with the sports they love.
About a year and a half ago, I reached out to my social media connections to see if anybody had any good sports betting stories. I was writing a book on the subject after a 2018 Supreme Court ruling allowed states to legalize sports betting and wanted to explore the topic from as many angles as possible.
The next day, I received a message from Evan Abenstein ’20. I knew this guy well — we traveled together to Argentina during a Winter Term course and we were both long-suffering New York Knicks fans. He told me that he had developed a new sports obsession. It involved scouring online sportsbooks for “glitches,” betting lines posted by companies like DraftKings or FanDuel that, if acted upon quickly, could result in a guaranteed win. For instance, maybe a bet remained posted after a game had already ended. That’s a no-risk win. Or maybe an extra zero was added to an NBA player’s “prop” bet, allowing you to wager that they’ll score fewer than 200 points rather than 20 points. Again: easy money.
It was a fascinating story, another wrinkle to the emergence of widespread legalized sports betting across the United States. To some, it probably reinforces the notion that betting has taken over American sports. The concern is understandable. Ads for these companies are everywhere. It often seems like people are far more concerned with their own wager — or with finding glitches — than they are with the performance of their favorite team. Addiction is a real concern as well, especially among young people who suddenly have betting ads flooding their social media feeds and six different apps on their phone tempting them to place a wager.
But there’s another angle here. In my upcoming book, “Over/Under: An Unexpected History of Sports Betting,” I make the case that sports betting isn’t a result of the multibillion-dollar American sports industry but rather a primary reason for it. In fact, when I began researching the origin of nearly every major American sport — horse racing and boxing, of course, but also baseball, basketball, football, golf and others — I discovered that the first fans who bought a ticket to the arena or stadium were often there not to support their hometown heroes but rather to throw a couple bucks down on the outcome. It turns out that beating the bookie any way possible, which is what glitch-seeking is really all about, is a longtime American tradition.
If that’s true, if betting is a fundamental building block to nearly 200 years of sports fandom and obsession — perhaps the fundamental building block — what happens now that the activity is not only widespread but increasingly accessible? While there are important questions being asked by politicians and journalists about advertising, culpability and addiction, equally interesting to me as a sport management professor is the future of fandom. Do teams, leagues and media partners really want to foster an environment of props and parlays? A sports landscape where fans focus on point spreads, moneylines and glitches rather than generational loyalty and regional identity?
Because if the teams, leagues and media partners keep telling their viewers and attendees to bet, bet some more and then keep betting, that’s what a lot of their so-called fans — especially the young ones — are going to do. It might very well be instinctual. And then we’ll all be wondering the same thing: Do Americans actually want their team to win? Or do they just want to beat the bookie?
David Bockino, associate professor of sport management and director of Elon’s media analytics program, is the author of “Over/Under.” The book, which was featured on The New York Times list of “New Nonfiction Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026,” comes out in June.