OUTLINE:
Intro:
A story about attending my first sports event with my dad and brother at the Super Bowl
How I became an avid sports fan and giving the reader a clear concise perspective of how I view sports and how I saw it before the inclusion of gambling
Thesis/Main Argument
Sports gambling negatively affects the social aspect of watching a game/event.
Encouraging fans to cheer for their personal gain as opposed to being a part of the team community.
Taking advantage of individuals' love of sports by being heavily promoted on sports networks, social media accounts, and other places
Addictive nature of sports gambling. Makes sports fans entitled and heavily criticize outcomes they believe were
Case Study on the Type of Bets being made
Data were collected from 10 of my friends who are big sports fans.
Shows a trend toward betting on aspects of a sporting event that don’t involve the outcome of a game/event.
Integration of sports gambling on Social Media/prominent sports networks
Frequency in which I have dramatically noticed sports gambling being promoted on Instagram, Sports Center, and other places. Has become intertwined with every type of sport and encourages gambling.
My sports addiction: Fantasy Football
My addiction to fantasy football and how it changed my perception of the way I consumed sports
Started to care about the performance of individual players as opposed to the results of my favorite team
Realized how much more stressful and aggressively competitive it made me.
Conclusion
Having been exposed to this type of quantification, do you find it hard to resist thinking about it that way? Gamified in a way that. The logic of quantification. This is why this a problem. Not be deeply financially invested, it’s really hard to see it another way. Won by logic because you can correctively a math problem.
Connect it to a number of games. Politics, TV shows, creepy quantification
I remember attending my first New England Patriots game at the age of 12. A few weeks before, my brother and I had teamed up together, subtly hinting to my dad why we needed to go. Every day, one of us would mention to him how cool it would be to attend a game in person or how cheap tickets were. We even signed his Gmail account to receive constant advertisements about football season ticket sales on StubHub. When my dad finally caved into the This wasn’t just a regular season game either, my dad had decided to bring both my brother and me to Super Bowl XLVI. After years of watching Tom Brady do the impossible on the family room TV every Sunday, this felt different. No longer did it feel like I was watching a television show. This was real. Thousands of screaming and passionate fans were across the stadium.
Sports, to me, has always been centered around its social impact. Bringing all different kinds of people together to support a team or sport. No matter where you live or what team you follow, there is always a community of people you can connect with. In middle school, I met some of my closest friends of 10+ years by starting up a conversation about who their favorite football team was. Never would I have thought that a debate about whether or not the Patriots could win a Super Bowl this year would result in meeting my best friend. Since the legalization of sports betting in 2019 though, the integration of gambling into sports has subtly altered the community.
The term Sports betting sounds just as you would expect it to be defined. It is when two or more individuals wager money on a sporting event. Simple enough. Yet despite what seems to be a straightforward and simple concept, the industry has seen massive changes to not just its growth and size, but also the sheer complexity of the type of bets you can now make. No longer are bets just focused on the outcome of which team wins, but also can depend on how much a team wins/losses, the performance of a player, the point spread of a game, and much more. With these types of bets prevalent, it makes viewers watching the game more distracted by the outcome of the bet as opposed to the action on the field or court.
My sports addiction: Fantasy Football
I remember the first day we started the league. It was September of 2012 and my friends and I had decided on creating a 12-person fantasy football league. Alex, one of my closest friends and the commissioner of the league, had sent out invitations to each of us on our Yahoo account. It took me an embarrassingly long to come up with a password that Yahoo would finally accept and that I would soon forget before I was allowed in. When the page finally reloaded, the top of the page read “Flint Hill Fantasy Football League”, with click here to join the league. I clicked the letters with an undescribable curiosity and excitement, ready to start my first season as a Fantasy Football manager. On September, 4th 2012, the day of the first draft, I made sure to enter the draft queue 30 minutes before it started so that there was no chance of auto-drafting my team (a fantasy manager's worst nightmare). All of us had met up at Alex’s place to be together for the first-ever draft in Flint Hill football insiders league history. Supplied with lots of cheese/pepperoni pizza and a large quantity of soda at the kitchen table, we were ready to begin the process. I sat in the middle of the table next to Alex and my other best friend, Jack. Everyone was boxed in together like a swarm of sardines all around the table, each with their computers open and laughing while stuffing themselves with the warm cheesy crust from Pizza Hut.
DING!
There it was. The start of the draft. I looked up to the top left of my screen to see a bright red text box with the letters “TEAM BILLY IS ON THE CLOCK” followed by a timer counting down from 30 seconds. Laughter around the table came to a complete halt. The only noise that could be heard was the beat of the clock counting down each precious second of time to make a decision. I glanced up to see Billy with a serious but indecisive look on his face. With only 5 seconds left, his finger quickly pressed the mousepad on his computer “BILLY’S TEAM SELECTS ARIAN FORSTER”. The first pick had been made and there was no looking back. Jack then made his selection, followed by Alex, Max, and Jose. Before long, I was on the clock and I was in a complete dilemma. I couldn’t think of who to select or what I wanted to do. Should I draft an RB in the first round since there are a lot fewer quality starting RBs in the league? Or, do I draft the best player and get Calvin Johnson to solidify my WR core? For every second I thought about it, my brain argued with itself, constantly flip-flopping between both players. Time would soon make its ugly head again with only 5 seconds left on the clock, and at this point, I had to do what any reasonable or sensible person would: close my eyes and select whichever player was closest to me. “Dang it. I wanted him,” I heard Jared say in a frustrated but joking way. This piqued my interest and made me open my eyes immediately to look at the draft announcement on my computer. “DOMINATORS SUPER DAVE SELECTS CALVIN JOHNSON”. I was so excited to have drafted my first-ever fantasy football player. From that moment on, my entire perception of the way I watched and consumed football altered for the next 7 years of my life without me even realizing it.
The first day of the season began on September 9, 2012. The weeks leading up to this day have been filled with lots of opposing trash talk coming from “supposedly” better-constructed teams. Yeah, ok Alex, I’m sure drafting Lesean Mccoy in the first round was a better pick than Calvin Johnson. That didn’t bother me though, I was happy with my fantasy team. Besides, the Patriots were gonna be on too and I cared way about them more than the results of my fantasy league. When the clock hit 1:00 pm, I positioned myself in the middle of the family room couch in front of the biggest tv we had in the house. I flipped onto the NFL Direct TV channel expecting to see the Patriots game but was instead greeted by a new face. “Welcome back everyone, glad to be here with you on the first day of the 2012 NFL season. I’m your host Andrew Siciliano, and this is NFL Redzone on Direct TV where will be showing you 7 hours of commercial-free football. Let’s get started”. 7 hours of commercial-free football. Wow!. Any thoughts of flipping to the Patriots game immediately flew out of my head. How could I pass on the chance to watch my Patriots play and check how my fantasy team was doing without having to watch any commercials.
The next 7 hours that followed were both intense and stressful. Redzone showed every scoring play in real-time from TD to a field goal, to even a safety. My eyes were glued to the screen. All I could think about was whether or not any of my fantasy players on my team were involved in the scoring play. “Stafford with a fadeaway to the endzone…. Oh right above Calvin Johnson’s head. Incomplete pass”. I felt the frustration build up inside me and grabbed the pillow sitting idly by pressing it to my chest. Come on Stafford. Are you kidding me? Alex’s team is ahead by 30 points and you overthrow a 6’5 target with amazing hands and a 5’ height advantage over the guy guardian him. Every 30 seconds that passed, I kept on refreshing the Yahoo fantasy matchup page, hoping for someone, anyone to make a play. “Why aren’t you watching the Patriots game” I heard my dad say while walking into the room. My face turned white as a sudden realization came to me. I had gotten so caught up with the performance of my fantasy team, that I totally forgot about my actual team. The Patriots were in a close matchup in the 4th quarter against the Houston Texans and I had missed most of the game. My dad and brother joined me on the couch as we watched the rest of the final quarter. We cheered, we laughed, and we smiled watching Tom Brady carve his way down the field, picking apart the Texans' defense and clinching our first win of the season. For the first time all day, I felt relaxed and could talk about the game.
The next week that followed, I reverted back into the same person I was in week 1. I flipped on RedZone and sat in front of the tv cheering on a team constructed of individual players that only mattered to me if they filled up the stat sheet. Even during the weeks my team won, I would only ever feel relaxed until it was all but certain I was going to win. Despite this, there was one aspect of the league that made the stress-inducing matchup each week worth it, validation. The excitement I got each week seeing players I specifically chose and put together succeed validated my sports knowledge. For the first time in my life, I was able to be more than just a fan who blindly supports their team
Case Study:
During the 2023 Super bowl matchup involving the Kansas City Chiefs vs. the Philadelphia Eagles, I decided to run a study by collecting data from 10 of my friends who were betting on the game. I wanted to see what type of bets my friends were making. Of those 10 people, a total of 40 bets were made.
The results showed that 32.5% of the type of bets were parlay, 32.5% of them were prop bets, 20% were total bets, and 2.5% were straight bets. Although a relatively small size, the data that was collected came from individuals who consider themselves huge fans of the sport. The significant percentage of bets being spread, parlay, and prop bets show an increasingly strong trend towards non-team outcome-based betting. What really shocked me about these bets though, was the total amount of money placed on these reached close to $1000 dollars, indicating a high level of risk and importance on these bets. Despite none of my friends having a strong attachment to either team, their love and knowledge of football encouraged them to bet on them anyway so they would have something to cheer for. Instead of football being about cheering for your team, the dynamics have changed This completely shifts the dynamic of sports, Additionally, none of my friends ever gambled on anything before sports.
Comments