Sports betting in the United States has come a long way, and all the progress has happened extremely quickly. On May 14, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the ban on sports wagering was unconstitutional, and that left it up to each individual state to decide the legality of gambling on sports within their borders.
You can now place a legal sports wager in 18 states. That leaves 32 states to go, and the legislative process may now get sped up due to the coronavirus pandemic and its disastrous effect on state economies.
If you look at the highlights from the gambling revenue report you’ll see that New Jersey is the state which provides the model for all others to work off of. The Garden State was instrumental in getting us to this point, and it’s possible, when all American sports are back in action, they could eclipse Nevada as the epicenter state for sports betting in this country. The proximity to Atlantic City sure has helped.
One of New Jersey’s neighboring states, Pennsylvania, has seen the fruits of legalizing sports betting as well. The highest single month revenue for sports betting in Pennsylvania was January 2020, when they took in $22,841,192. New Jersey, generating a revenue figure of $53,561,626, also had their best month in January. A whole lot of that was due to Super Bowl betting, and everyone has declined from that peak since. And of course, the numbers fell way off a cliff once the COVID-19 crisis hit and shut down American sports for the time being.
The numbers will return to normal, and eventually down the line, surge once we get our big, brand name team sports back. As former NBA player turned NASCAR broadcaster Brad Daugherty once said, the NFL slaughters everything in America.
Once they’re back, sports betting will be as well, because there are numerous ways to bet on the National Football League, and all of these methods are quite popular. Betting for/against the spread, the over/unders, prop betting etc. are all huge, but the real explosion of growth has been in daily fantasy. The debate about whether or not daily fantasy sports is gambling or not doesn’t matter much anymore. Legal sports betting in the U.S. is in a new era now.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” regularly contributes to WGN TV, Sports Illustrated, Chicago Now and SB Nation.
You can follow Banks, a former writer for Chicago Tribune.com, on Twitter and his cat on Instagram.