In 2018, the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association (formerly Christie v. NCAA), which effectively ended the federal ban on sports betting.
The state of New Jersey challenged the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), a 1992 federal law that prohibited states from "authorizing" or "licensing" sports gambling.
On May 14, 2018, the Court ruled 6-3 that PASPA was unconstitutional. The majority found that the law violated the "anti-commandeering" doctrine of the Tenth Amendment by essentially giving orders to state legislatures on how to regulate their own citizens.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, stating that "Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own."
States, smelling easy money, have jumped into the legalized sports gambling frenzy and are cashing in. Thirty-nine states have legalized sports books in their jurisdiction, and the growth of the "handle" (total wagered) has been staggering.
Year Total Legal Wagers Notable Milestones
2024 $149.6 Billion Record year; North Carolina mobile launch
2023 $121.1 Billion First time surpassing $100 billion
2022 $93.2 Billion Driven by New York's mobile betting launch
2021 $57.2 Billion Market nearly doubled from previous year
2020 $21.5 Billion Growth slowed briefly by pandemic shutdowns
2019 $13.0 Billion Early expansion following 2018 ruling
• More than 95% of all sports activity now happens through mobile apps and online platforms rather than at physical retail windows.
• In 2024, Illinois overtook New Jersey to become the second-largest market for sports betting revenue, though New York remains the top state for both handle and revenue.
• Out of the $149.6 billion wagered in 2024, sportsbooks kept approximately $13.7 billion in gross gaming revenue after paying out winners.
That's an incredible amount of money that's just sitting there waiting for crooks to grab, just by convincing a kid to tank a game, or a pro to underperform. It has happened already, it's happening now, and will continue to happen unless Congress steps in and bans sportsbooks.
Wait, what?
Sportsbook revenue grew 1,200 percent from 2020 to 2024, and although the prevalence of gambling and gambling problems is woefully understudied—which some health experts believe is deliberate, to shield the industry from scrutiny—signs point to an emerging crisis. Roughly a third of sports gamblers say they’ve felt “ashamed” after betting, a fifth say they have trouble meeting financial obligations as a result of their betting, and about half of them say they’re not fully honest with family and friends about how much and how often they bet.
Nevertheless, some of the power brokers who orchestrated the betting boom have insisted that, despite everything playing out before our eyes, there actually isn’t any more betting going on than before; it just all used to happen illegally. While it’s impossible to know exactly how much money used to be wagered under the table, there’s overwhelming evidence to suggest that more Americans are gambling on sports now than ever before: the surge of people seeking help for gambling problems, the alarm sounded by educators who see their students suddenly obsessed with betting, and certainly the outpouring of venom from gamblers whenever an athlete, coach, or referee costs them a bet.
The AP reports that the most recent scandal in college basketball "involved more than 39 players on 17 Division I men’s basketball teams who manipulated or attempted to manipulate 29 games in the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons."
That's just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the college basketball disgrace, in the last year, there have been betting scandals in baseball, pro basketball, and tennis.
Does anyone imagine the situation is going to get any better?
The fact that all sports leagues, at every level, are grasping for the money that legalized sports betting brings in, and the tax revenues generated by sports books are making states dependent on the vice, means that trying to put the genie back in the bottle may be impossible.
Danny Funt, the author of a new book on legalized gambling, points out that America has made its bed and now must lie in it.
The commissioners of professional sports leagues spent a century advocating for betting bans. At their urging, in 1992, Congress deliberated over whether to block a movement among states to authorize bookmaking. Commissioners, athletes, coaches, regulators, gambling executives, and an expert on compulsive gambling endured intense questioning about what might happen if bookmaking were made legal across the country. Were leagues and law enforcement equipped to stop gambling from corrupting sports? Would legalization pull gamblers from the black market, or would it just expand the pool of people betting both legally and illegally? How prevalent is gambling addiction, and would normalizing sports betting risk spawning a public health crisis?
Twenty-six years later, as states rushed to collect tax revenue from sports betting, these questions were largely brushed aside. I interviewed more than 300 people for my book, Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling, and again and again, I heard people say the rationale for embracing sports betting was simple: The money at stake was too good to pass up.
"In recent years, several men have been arrested for threatening to murder athletes and their relatives in the most gruesome ways imaginable," writes Funt. People are far more emotionally engaged in a game or match if they have money riding on it. Given that gambling addiction has exploded as a social problem in the U.S., it's not unimaginable that someone in a rage will take their frustrations out on players, coaches, and referees.
Short of driving sports books back underground, we're just going to have to live with the probability that no one will be able to trust that players and others associated with a sport aren't deliberately trying to lose or underperform to satisfy the spread or a parlay.
The new year promises to be one of the most pivotal in recent history. Midterm elections will determine if we continue to move forward or slide back into lawfare, impeachments, and the toleration of fraud.
PJ Media will give you all the information you need to understand the decisions that will be made this year. Insightful commentary and straight-on, no-BS news reporting have been our hallmarks since 2005.
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