Shortly before tip-off of the Louisville–Creighton men’s basketball game on March 20, the digital-media and podcasting company Barstool Sports went live from the DraftKings Sportsbook at Wrigley Field. It was the start of March Madness, college basketball’s annual sixty-four-team tournament, and Barstool’s leading personalities—founder Dave Portnoy and a host of other sports and pop-culture influencers—had gathered to watch the morning slate of games. More precisely, they had come to wager on the outcomes.
The forty-eight-year-old Portnoy, who describes himself as a “degenerate gambler,” welcomed viewers to the live stream. “This is the time to lock in your picks with our partners at DraftKings. Right now, they’re offering all new customers $200 in bonus bets instantly after betting just five bucks.” He paused, then added, “I always wonder who hasn’t signed up for DraftKings.” He urged the holdouts to download the betting app. “Let’s have a day.”
Dan “Big Cat” Katz, host of Barstool’s top-ranked Pardon My Take podcast, clapped his hands and announced his first wager: “Creighton race to ten.” Portnoy nodded and locked in the in-game prop bet—that Creighton would score ten points before Louisville—for an undisclosed amount. A green sign tracking the bet popped up on the screen. Under it crawled the start times and betting lines of upcoming games.
For the next fifteen minutes, as Louisville and Creighton exchanged possessions, the group focused on the action, just like the estimated 9 million other viewers who tuned in for the first day of the tournament. Other than the high-definition cameras and corporate sponsorships, the Barstool event was probably a lot like the informal watch parties that sprang up that day in dorm rooms, student lounges, and fraternity houses all across the country. And, like the Barstool personalities, the vast majority of those college-aged men had money on the games.
Wagers on this year’s men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments are expected to surpass $3.1 billion, according to the American Gaming Association. That’s up 12 percent from last year, and more than twice as much as what people bet on this year’s Super Bowl. The Barstool stream was an invitation to get in on the fun. As Big Cat likes to say, “there’s nothing better than betting with your friends.”
When Creighton senior guard Steven Ashworth finally hit a three to put the Blue Jays up eleven to seven, the Barstool crew erupted in cheers. Big Cat shook his fist and said, “That’s how you win the first bet.” Portnoy stood up and started high-fiving people. The room settled down, and most of the group turned their attention back to the game, but Portnoy remained on his feet, still buzzing from his win. “I wish I’d bet more,” he said.
In recent years, Portnoy has emerged as a dominant figure in the brand of media favored by young men. What started out as a free four-page newspaper is now a sports-and-entertainment empire with millions of fans that is worth more than half a billion dollars. Among Barstool’s most popular features are Portnoy’s “One Bite Pizza Reviews,” the company’s regular lineup of podcasts, and short videos featuring various members of the Barstool staff engaging in behavior that would get most people fired. Portnoy is brash, opinionated, and funny in a Trumpian kind of way. His popularity, which extends from college campuses and the “manosphere” to the White House, is due in large part to the fact that he and everyone else at Barstool talk about sports and pop culture the same way their audience does.
Much of the company’s success stems from its gambling content. The Barstool Gambling account has more than 650,000 followers on TikTok, and about three hundred thousand people watched the six-hour live stream from the DraftKings Sportsbook on Barstool’s YouTube channel. Subsequent streams broadcast throughout the tournament performed just as well.
It’s tempting to characterize Portnoy as the face of sports betting. But the practice has become so common that he and other personalities at Barstool occupy only a small corner of the multi-billion-dollar industry, which is still less than a decade old.
Since the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on commercial sports betting in 2018, thirty-eight states have legalized it. Mobile betting is now legal in thirty states, including New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, the three largest sports-gambling markets in the country. (Nevada was granted an exemption under the earlier federal ban, and California and Texas have yet to legalize sports betting.) Last year alone, gamblers bet approximately $150 billion on sporting events, which generated about $14 billion in revenue for the betting industry—30 percent of which came from online websites and apps, including DraftKings and its primary competitor, FanDuel.
All four of the major professional-sports leagues—the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL—have a partnership with a “sportsbook,” or betting platform, as do most of the regional and national television networks that broadcast games in markets where online betting is legal. Turn on any sporting event these days and you’ll hear a play-by-play announcer or studio host promoting betting opportunities with a preferred betting platform. It’s a win-win proposition: leagues can attract a new segment of viewers more invested in their own bets than in any particular team, while sportsbooks ensure the viewers have plenty of opportunities to place bets.
Even colleges are trying to get in on the action. At least eight universities have partnered with sportsbooks, and dozens of athletic departments have teamed up with traditional casinos in an effort to recoup some of the revenue they lost during the pandemic.
From March Madness to the Super Bowl, the two most bet-on sporting events of the year, sportsbooks are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to capture the attention of sports fans, particularly male sports fans. And it’s working. According to a new poll, an estimated 22 percent of all Americans have at least one account with an online sportsbook, while 48 percent of men between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine have an account.
In 2023, the NCAA commissioned a survey to determine how many college students were betting on sports. Nearly 60 percent of respondents said they bet on sports, while 4 percent reported that they bet on sports every day. “The biggest increases in gambling participation have been among young, educated men,” the executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling recently told Time magazine. “The closer you are to college, the more likely you are to bet sports.”
A junior at Rutgers Business School in New Jersey told me that, while he doesn’t bet, his fraternity brothers are “knee-deep” in online gambling. “We’ve normalized gambling as a pastime instead of treating it as a vice, like we used to do. Every kid I know does it. Some can’t go a Sunday without betting on a game. They do it just to add some fun. Or they bet on stuff they have no interest in, like women’s basketball or tennis.” Most members of his fraternity also play live-dealer blackjack and other games through online casinos, often in class or out at a bar. “I’ve heard of some people losing hundreds of dollars,” he said. “Even thousands.”
For all the camaraderie and fun that betting apps promise, the rise of online sports betting and online gaming has resulted in a dramatic increase in problematic and compulsive gambling behavior, especially in young people. A poll conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that ten percent of young men between age eighteen and thirty (and seven percent of women) demonstrate addictive gambling behavior, compared to just three percent of the general population. In the few years since New Jersey legalized sports betting, the state’s council on compulsive gambling has seen a 277 percent increase in calls to its helpline. Most of these calls were placed by young men. “Nobody wants to say that somebody’s addicted,” the student at Rutgers told me, “but it’s very obvious they are.”
Young men are now starting to experience the predictable downsides of gambling. A growing percentage of college-aged bettors report borrowing money to cover losses. In states where gambling is legal, young men are now more likely to have lower credit scores and higher rates of bankruptcy, among other financial difficulties.
Anna B. Moreland, an associate professor of theology at Villanova University and coauthor of The Young Adult Playbook, says online gambling is not only causing personal financial problems, but also “tearing away at the social fabric.” She explains: “I talk a lot about leisure in class, how to find it and cultivate it as a way to get away from the pressure and anxiety of school and life. But gambling has completely invaded this space. Rather than watching a game together to decompress, kids are on their phones betting. They’re not hanging out. They’re gambling.”
States are already considering ways to regulate how sportsbooks market themselves to young adults, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Rep. Paul D. Tonko (D-NY) recently introduced the Supporting Affordability and Fairness with Every Bet (SAFE Bet) Act, which would establish federal standards for sportsbooks that operate in states where gambling is legal. The bill would prohibit sportsbooks from advertising during live sporting events and from offering special incentives like “bonus” and “no sweat” bets designed to induce gambling—essentially everything Barstool was doing during its live stream. It would also prevent operators from accepting more than five deposits from a customer in a twenty-four-hour period and require operators to conduct affordability checks on customers before accepting wagers in excess of $1,000 in one day or $10,000 in one month.
As SAFE Bet awaits a vote, college-aged men are left to navigate an increasingly treacherous market on their own. The only people talking to them about gambling are, for the most part, the people and companies that want them to do more of it. “In my three years in the fraternity, I’ve only been to one talk about sports betting and how to gamble responsibly,” the student at Rutgers told me. “It was sponsored by DraftKings.”
