NPR’s Scott Detrow talks with New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang about his recent piece on online sports betting and how it’s affecting professional and college sports.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
It is Final Four weekend in college basketball. On the women’s side, Iowa and South Carolina will play for the title tomorrow. The men’s semifinals are tonight, and it is a big weekend for sports betting – maybe, in some cases, too big. The president of the NCAA, Charlie Baker, is raising concerns about the amount of abuse being directed at college athletes by bettors, people who put money down on a point spread or a specific play someone may or may not make during a game, are increasingly taking out their losing frustrations by attacking players on social media. Baker said this week that 1 in 3 student athletes has been harassed by bettors. He and the NCAA are now urging states to ban prop betting on college sports.
New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang has written about the world of prop betting, including a recent piece called “Online Gambling Is Changing Sports For The Worse.” Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
JAY CASPIAN KANG: Hey, thanks for having me.
DETROW: I feel like it wasn’t that long ago that pro sports didn’t want to be in Las Vegas because of concerns about gambling, and now you’ve got ads for casinos on the field. You’ve got sportsbooks in stadiums in many places. It feels like every single commercial break is just promoting one online thing or another. It just feels like suddenly pervasive on all elements of sports, which is – which seems to be leading to some of the problems here.
KANG: Yeah. I think that, you know, there’s a lot of reasons for that. You know, the dynamic that you’re talking about is absolutely true. But when trying to figure out why that’s happened, I think a lot of it, like many explanations in the entertainment industry, is because of a move to streaming, uncertainty over what…
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