Sports betting must come with real guardrails, or it shouldn’t come to Texas at all | Opinion

Anyone counting Austin’s cards is likely aware that the odds of Texas legalizing some form of expanded gambling are growing larger. Gov. Greg Abbott has “no problem” with online sports betting, telling the Houston Chronicle that he would “be shocked if there were not some Texans that do it already.”

Abbott is entirely right on the latter — at least some of the 60% of Texans who, according to a University of Houston poll, support legalized gambling aren’t waiting for anyone’s permission.

Our major men’s pro sports organizations have put all their chips in, including the Dallas Cowboys, Texas Rangers and Houston Rockets. Mavericks owner Miriam Adelson, who is the widow of casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, contributed over a million dollars to Abbott’s last campaign. Call it a moneyline.

A sports-gambling bill passed the House in 2023, but Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says there aren’t enough Republican votes in the Senate for more gambling. He is largely seen as the last major impediment to a gambling expansion. Our freedom-at-all-costs ethos is in tension with religious conservative beliefs of leaders such as Patrick. But you don’t have to be dogmatic to have a dog in this fight.

We believe gambling should be understood a little less like a more exciting version of the stock market and, as public health advocate Richard Daynard argued in a Time magazine profile, more like smoking cigarettes. We’re not all going to die from it. After all, many people have a grandpa who smoked two packs a day and lived to 100, and there are the casual, social smokers who never let it get too far.

But a few too many developed emphysema and died at 52. Others lived with that grandpa and developed breathing problems — or cancer — strictly because they lived in the same household. Others just have nasty teeth. And many people just simply think smoking at the restaurant kills the vibe.

If you’ve ever watched a sporting event in one of the 38 states and DC that have legalized online sports betting, you might realize we’re talking about the same thing. You might have hated that same-game parlay you tried but not want it banned. You might also carefully budget the price of two fancy lattes a day on silly plays — “the Mavs would never trade Luka, but look at the payout!” — and it never extends past your budget.

Or maybe, you have more in common with the vulnerable households emptying out their investment portfolios created with a fiduciary obligation to the consumer to chase deceptive “risk free” bets. Maybe you don’t have a problem with gambling yourself, but your spouse or son does, and that’s enough to show up in court pleading for bankruptcy relief. Maybe you’re just sick of the constant gambling ads. You wish Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul would stick to dealing meth instead moneylines, or for Jamie Foxx to take that dang wig off.

If it’s not the ads, it’s sports tickers replaced with data curiously similar to the kind of granular info the degenerates among us might use for a live bet. In what situation do you really need Evan Carter’s 0-0 reach base probability?

Ultimately, we have more data than we did in 2018 – the year the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that barred sports betting – about how and why gamblers start with DraftKings and end with sponsors and support groups. For all the revenue it has generated for state coffers, there are too many lifelong consequences to wave away.

When Abbott and others suggest that there’s always been sports betting, and many Texans are doing it now, they’re right. But as with so many aspects of online life, the ubiquity of the smartphone app weaponizes what used to be a difficult habit to indulge. There’s a world of difference between finding and calling a bookie to take the Cowboys to cover and betting on the outcome of every single snap of the ball.

We see two options. First, don’t legalize it — let it be a fringe habit. We don’t need to deploy the Texas Rangers (the team or the cops) to anyone’s door for setting up a VPN, but we can allow the century-long stigma to remain and do the majority of the policing.

If we allow it instead, we need smarter guardrails on the behavior. For example: strict caps on the frequency of ads, fewer celebrity endorsements and limits on what ads can say to consumers. Gambling companies have no problem capping the bets of smart gamblers who play the long game and develop sophisticated models that beat the house. Why not the same for lower-income gamblers, those who constantly place high risk bets, and maybe even algorithmically determined “problem gamblers”?

We know exactly why companies won’t sufficiently regulate themselves and bite the hand keeping their mouths fed. But stopping an addiction before it happens is a safer, more ethical and scaleable approach than slapping on the number of a state gambling hotline to dial after you take out your third mortgage.

In other words: More seat belts, fewer ambulances.

If you can’t submit to maneuvers that constrain the likelihood of a public health crisis, then that’s why you have 38 other states willing to gamble the lives of their people for a quick buck. Texas doesn’t need to inhale their secondhand shame.