CHARLOTTE, N.C. — March Madness is just around the corner, but this year’s NCAA tournament offers a different experience for sports fans.
North Carolina residents can now legally bet on sports games.
Eight operators have been activated, meaning people can place bets on their mobile phones.
Economics and gambling experts predict that legalization will generate many economic benefits for North Carolina.
But not everyone is excited about the prospects of sports betting.
Sean McKeever is a professor of philosophy at Davidson College and one of his classes is philosophy of sports.
McKeever says legalized mobile sports betting is a risky gamble.
“Everybody’s excited because it’s a brand new thing,” McKeever said. “Our current excitement is great, but we also need to be calm and think about what the effects are as they happen. We won’t know the effects of this law for months or even years. I think people should behave and not be so quick to assume, it’s something great or something terrible. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
McKeever says someone betting on an NCAA tournament game doesn’t in and of itself destroy the game. Rather, he is concerned with how sports betting leads to gambling situations that can affect the integrity of the sport.
“Historically, we know that gambling can sometimes have a corrupting influence on sports,” McKeever said. “It can lead to game fixing.”
McKeever cited the 1919 Black Sox scandal.
According to the Library of Congress, gamblers were responsible for paying several Chicago White Sox players to rig the World Series game.
Several White Sox players have admitted their involvement in the scandal, and eight have been charged with conspiracy to defraud the public on charges, according to the National Research Library.
A jury found the players not guilty, but they were banned by the National Baseball Commissioner from ever playing professional baseball again.
“It was a threat to the whole enterprise of baseball,” McKeever said. “I mean, we go back 100 years, but in the late 1970s, Boston College was involved in a point-shaving scandal. So there’s nothing that makes college sports immune to these forces.”
College athletes can now cash in on their image and name image, but McKeever worries that sports betting could threaten that.
“If you have a player whose teammates are winning six figures, even NIL, and they’re not doing anything, and somebody who’s in the gambling business comes and says, ‘Hey, we’re going to give you some money to miss a few penalty kicks.’ , this [may] seems like a tempting offer to this person [and] that would be a tragedy,” McKeever said.
McKeever urges everyone to learn more about the pros and cons of mobile sports betting.
“One thing I think people need to do is see a difference between betting on sports and betting in a casino or betting on a home poker game,” McKeever said. “The reason I think we need to think about them differently is that sport is a valuable activity in its own right.”
“The NCAA Tournament is coming up [will] be an exciting and great event. Players and fans would be passionate about it even if there was no betting,” he said. “But no one would [likely] they go to casinos or hang out there if they can’t win or lose money.”
McKeever says he hopes fans will continue to look at evidence and evaluate how gambling affects college sports.
“I’m always in favor of taking things slow,” he said.
