Dustin Gray’s office in Petersen Events Center has a nice view, overlooking Pitt’s school of medicine a few stories above Terrace Street. The view correlates to the responsibility.
Being Pitt’s — or anyone’s — senior associate athletic director for administration, the individual who oversees compliance and is the primary contact for NCAA governance, isn’t easy in 2019. Now, at the beginning of the first football season with mobile gambling both legal and operational in Pennsylvania, Mr. Gray has even more to worry about regarding the athletic department’s staff of more than 200 and the thousands of athletes.
“What we’ve had to do,” he said, “is amplify our education to all those people.”
Allowing bettors to gamble from their phones on the couch, or in the stadium, will increase the volume of bets placed and could increase revenue for both the NFL and the state. While legalization should lead to increased transparency, making match-fixing or point-shaving easier to spot, more money in play requires increased scrutiny.
“Legal markets protect consumers and game integrity, add tax revenues to the state coffer and provide viable alternatives for consumers to the dangerous illegal market,” American Gaming Association President and CEO Bill Miller said.
According to a study released Wednesday by the AGA, 38 million adults plan to bet on NFL games this season, including 16% of adults in Pennsylvania. The study found an 8% increase in Americans planning to bet online.
“As it has been for decades, is true today and will forever be, our No. 1 priority is protecting the integrity of the game,” said Brian McCarthy, NFL vice president of communications. “We spent a tremendous amount of time educating everyone who touches the National Football League, more than 10,000 people, from front office staff to coaches, players, to game-day assistants.”
The Steelers released a statement to the Post-Gazette echoing Mr. McCarthy’s comments.
Mobile sports gambling became possible in May 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) of 1992. The law Gov. Tom Wolf signed in October 2017 led to the first online sports bets being placed in May.
Pennsylvania casinos have to pay a one-time fee of $10 million for a betting license, and that license grants them a single “skin,” meaning each casino can sponsor one online betting company. Currently, there are at least four operational online sportsbooks: SugarHouse, BetRivers, Parx and FanDuel. Fox Bet, the product of a deal between global gaming provider The Stars Group and Fox Sports, was expected to launch Wednesday, according to reports, and DraftKings recently partnered with Penn National Gaming to enter the state and applied for the necessary licenses.
“I think we’re on the same page, in large part, in that we all agree that legal, mobile sports betting is the only way that you can actually eradicate illegal sports betting, almost all of which takes place through mobile sites and online through offshore operators,” said Jamie Chisholm, DraftKings’ director of global public affairs. “There’s total consensus on that.”
Mr. Gray spent 12 years working compliance at Jacksonville University and Iowa State before joining Pitt’s athletics department in 2016. He’s kept an eye on gambling since the beginning. The possibility of game-fixing is always there, but what worries him more are the small, innocuous leaks of information, a player in a walking boot disclosing his availability for Saturday’s game to a classmate and thinking nothing of it.
“When inside information comes out about teams, one, most of the time it’s private information, most of the time it’s protected by law, who knows if it’s injury-type things,” Mr. Gray said. “And then two, it can put us at a competitive disadvantage if that information is out there, and that’s definitely going to be more common.”
Pitt, along with most Division I and some Division II schools in the state, has met with the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board to discuss another concern — prop bets. Fixing a game single-handedly is difficult, but players have more control over the number of passes a receiver might catch or how many points a shooting guard might score.
“‘We’re not telling you to lose the game,’” Mr. Gray said by way of example. “‘We’re just telling you to get one less rebound.’”
Also attempting to give Mr. Gray some gray hairs: An anonymous 2016 NCAA study revealed that 24% of male student-athletes bet money on sports, violating NCAA bylaws in the process.
“We probably triple the time that we spend educating on it now,” Mr. Gray said. “I’m not naive enough to think that people couldn’t find a bookie if they wanted to, but it is just so much more accessible to our student-athletes that we need to make sure that our student-athletes know what they can or can’t do.”
Pitt recently partnered with U.S. Integrity, a company that evaluates line movement, injury information, referee behavior and abnormal wagering activity to help its clients keep their contests above board. The NFL expanded its agreement with Sportradar, a worldwide sports data and content provider, to include the distribution of real-time play-by-play data to gambling operators and monitoring of the integrity of its games.
The NFL has also lobbied Congress to pass legislation furthering the protection of the game’s integrity and bettors, recommending measures such as enforcing age limits, requiring the use of official league data, and combating money laundering and tax evasion.
“As Congress understood when it enacted PASPA, issues generated by sports betting cannot be confined within state lines,” Jocelyn Moore, the NFL’s executive vice president for communications and public affairs, wrote in a statement for the record to the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations last September. “Since then, the arrival of the internet has significantly compounded these issues. Sports betting remains an interstate question requiring a federal response.”
It’s growing. Sports betting accounted for $21.7 million in gambling revenue in the 2018-19 fiscal year. The state taxes the house cut at 36%, relatively high in the gambling world, meaning more revenue for the state. The AGA estimated last year that legal betting could increase the NFL’s revenue by $2.3 billion a year.
“We haven’t looked at it from a commercial aspect of a revenue generator at the league level,” Mr. McCarthy said.
Betting will only increase once football begins, with legal, mobile options now available. Open up SugarHouse’s sportsbook app and you can take the Steelers, who are 5½-point underdogs against the New England Patriots on Sunday. As of Wednesday, you could also make 82 other bets on the game, including “home team scores first and wins” and “first half winner and first half total points over/under 24.5.” And it won’t end there.
“It was always a pre-game activity,” Mr. Chisholm said. “You had like a line, you had the over/under, and then when the game started you sort of just sat back and sweated it out and chewed your fingernails and yelled at the screen. But now, so much of it, especially with mobile, it’s an all-game activity.”
Bill Brink: bbrink@post-gazette.com and Twitter @BrinkPG.
First Published: September 5, 2019, 10:30 a.m.
Updated: September 5, 2019, 10:39 a.m.
