Percentage of black athletes in professional sports betting
As the historical stigma around betting on sports betting rapidly fades, there is massive opportunity for gaming companies and sports leagues to bring even more Americans into the fold. About this Survey Sports Betting Dime partnered with a leading enterprise market research firm to survey the behaviors and opinions of active American sports bettors. Surveys were distributed and collected electronically between October 18 — 21, Results were collected via mobile phone, desktop, or tablet.
All respondents self-identified as active sports bettors. You can find more statistics and analysis from this study in our Research section. Discussion Let's have fun and keep it civil. Most Recent Betting Guides. As noted by Garrett and Marsh , once states began to legalize state lotteries, neighboring states began to feel pressure to legalize their own state games or otherwise lose consumer spending to lottery players crossing the border to buy tickets. By , this pressure had led all but 6 states to adopt lotteries after the first state lottery was reestablished in New Hampshire in Religious concerns have not stopped Mississippi from legalizing sports gambling, however.
Perhaps God just really wants to put a few bucks down on Ole Miss to upset the Tide this year. By the end of , 20 states and the District of Columbia had legalized sports gambling, 6 had legalized sports gambling but were pending launch, and over 20 more states were considering legislation Rodenberg It appears that sports gambling will soon be legal nearly nationwide.
The next big question facing the industry is assessing the potential size of the sports betting market. If sports wagering is restricted to in-person betting at existing casinos, the impact of nationwide legalization is likely to be quite modest. While these figures may seem high, they pale in comparison to gambling figures in the UK where sports betting has been legal although highly regulated since and is widely available through over as of March small, commercial betting shops spread throughout the country as well as through online betting sites.
Such revenue figures would likely only be possible with widespread adoption of legalized mobile sports gambling as well as within-game betting on individual plays as opposed to wagering solely on game outcomes. Obviously, another major question facing the industry is the extent to which expanded access to sports gambling will bring in new players to the gambling industry overall or whether it will simply cannibalize existing gambling options such as state lotteries, horse racing, or casino gaming.
The first paper in this symposium examines this topic by analyzing the determinants of sport gambling handle and its effects on other casino gaming at West Virginia casinos during roughly the first year of legalized sports betting in the state Humpheys Brad Humphreys finds that the introduction of sports gambling seems to have significantly decreased overall state gaming tax revenues as gains from sport gambling taxes were far outweighed by decreases in tax revenues from video lottery terminals.
Of course, even if the problem of cannibalization is avoided by sports gambling attracting a new customer base, this is not without its own set of problems as sports wagering may introduce an entirely new population to the problems associated with pathological gambling and problem gaming McGowan The second paper in this symposium examines health outcomes in Canada related to participation in gambling activities Humphreys et al.
Brad Humphreys, John Nyman, and Jane Ruseski show that recreational gambling has either no effect or even actually reduces the probability of having certain chronic health conditions and has a positive impact on life satisfaction suggesting the possibility that expanded sport gambling in the USA may not be associated with significant adverse health outcomes. Legalized sports gambling is certain to bring about winners and losers.
As noted above, depending on the level of cannibalization, other forms of gambling are likely to be losers such as horse racing, which is likely to continue its long-term decline in gambling handle Nash , and potentially casino gaming as identified by Humphreys in this symposium. On the other hand, sports book operators and mobile application developers are likely winners, so casinos themselves may either be either winners or losers in sports gambling legalization.
It is interesting to note that established casinos have not been the only players to enter the online sports gambling market. In many states, the companies FanDuel and DraftKings, who prior to sports gambling legalization operated online fantasy football competitions of controversial legality, have already been able to leverage their fan bases in the online fantasy sports gaming communities into more traditional online sports gambling opportunities.
The sports leagues themselves may also be either winners or losers. Historically in the USA, leagues strongly opposed legal sports betting due to the potential for corruption. More recently, however, leagues have become more supportive of sports betting. In part, leagues acknowledge that legal betting markets make it easier for regulators to uncover suspicious betting behavior that could suggest corruption. More importantly, teams and leagues have also slowly recognized the potential for higher fan interest if fans have the opportunity to gamble on games.
Humphreys et al. Furthermore, the dramatic increase in professional athlete salaries over the past several decades in the USA has reduced worries of corruption. It is highly unlikely that star players in any major US league would jeopardize their massive earning potential as an athlete by accepting a bribe to alter a game outcome and non-star players to whom a bribe could potentially be profitable are rarely in a position to influence games. Those sports that remain at more significant risk to corruption are those with a high level of fan interest but low player salaries.
This describes the working conditions of athletes prior to free-agency in the USA such as during the Black Sox scandal, referees like Tim Donaghy, and players in minor leagues or small national leagues as well as cricket players prior to the relatively recent formation of the Indian Premier League. It also describes the conditions of college athletes in the USA as the NCAA has successfully operated a cartel restricting the ability of even top college players from earning money as a player despite playing for teams generating millions or tens of millions of dollars annually for their host institutions.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that the NCAA remains adamantly opposed to sport gambling in contrast to the major professional leagues in the USA. Sports leagues are naturally eager to take steps to protect themselves against potential corruption in the wake of expanded gambling opportunities. The third paper in the symposium Depken and Gandar explores the topic of integrity fees, payments by sports books to leagues, supposedly to pay for monitoring to ensure against match fixing.
Craig Depken and John Gandar find evidence that integrity fees might influence sports books to establish lines that would minimize the chances for payouts in certain game situations. Finally, legalized sports gambling will provide researchers with troves of new data to analyze one of the oldest questions in gambling economics: are sports betting markets efficient?
The final paper in this symposium provides an excellent example of this type of research Brymer et al. Rhett Brymer, Ryan M. Rodenberg, Huimiao Zheng, and Tim R. Studies like these will remain a fertile area for continued economic research. As guest editor, I wish to thank Eastern Economic Journal co-editors Cynthia Bansak and Allan Zebedee, participants in the sports economics sessions at the 39th annual Eastern Economic Association Conference in New York City, February , and numerous anonymous referees for their assistance in putting together this symposium.
Most importantly, thanks go out to Eastern Economic Association Vice President Brad Humphreys who both proposed this symposium and collected and reviewed the participating papers. Eastern Economic Journal.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ACTIVE AGENT AND PLACEBO BAND
Blacks are vastly overrepresented in these sports. But why? The answers are found in social factors and processes. The decline of black Americans in baseball, for example, has little to do with how it's a "white man's sport. Then came the decline of black neighborhoods or what mid-century black sociologists called the Black Metropolis , which, until the s had a middle-class base. Government-sponsored suburbanization and private sector deindustrializtion left us with the "hood" of the s.
Baseball became a suburban sport, which is why many of the black MLB players are from the middle classes. News provides an excellent breakdown of this social process. But in general, blacks are overrepresented in professional sports. Many white Americans will, again, imagine that this has something to do with black genes, black athleticism, black African musculature. But this an illusion that only justifies white dominance in, say, the tech sector.
Whites have the genes for that kind of thing: coding, programming, electrical engineering, and what have you. In this view, black dominance in brawn is naturally balanced by white dominance in brains. But anyone who has taught in a US high-school system knows that this balance is strictly imposed on black males. Intellectuality is not just discouraged but not even recognized. When you reinforce this attitude by underfunding education, the remaining opportunities for black success are not found in the classroom but in the gym.
To make matters more cruel, the chances of a young black male becoming a professional sports star are cosmically slim. Smart, a publication of the American Medical Association. And the number of black brain surgeons was equal to 60 percent of the number of black men playing in the NBA. That number is rising, too. Soon there will be more black brain surgeons than black basketball players. Nevertheless, far too many of our children believe that it is, statistically, easier to make it into the NBA or the NFL than it is to make it into college and go on to professional school.
Advertisement Now, I grant you, in African Americans made up Put everyone in the above survey in a room, and only a tiny fraction of the workers, less than 0. That number would all but vanish if we expanded the survey to include all black workers employed in the United States last year: just 0. Remember, the above list is just a sampling of professions. For data on all occupation categories covered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, of which there are scores, click here.
Of course not. Nor should we! Talent speaks for itself. And should we be proud of the astonishing strides black athletes and the rest of our people have made in professional sports leagues, which before the s were closed off to them?
You better believe it! Advertisement But, and this is a big but, we also should be proud of the doctors, lawyers and teachers among us, the firefighters and police officers, the chefs and surgeons. We should know that our numbers in these professions and across the board are significant, and we should proclaim to anyone who will listen that the paths to all professions are within reach for every African-American child through education and hard work.
As I have said, when I was growing up, becoming a medical doctor was one of the highest ambitions to which a black child could aspire. My mother thought doctors sat in heaven at the right hand of Jesus. Advertisement Parents, please, I beg you, set the same expectation of your children and their friends. Then tell them that the first job they will ever have is going to school and that it will pay them throughout their lives in ways no numbers—and certainly no scoreboard—can capture.
Advertisement Most of all, this Labor Day, let us recognize the 17 million African Americans currently employed in the United States and challenge each other to do everything we can to bring the more troubling unemployment rate in our community—a staggering In that race, we all must be athletes.
Samuro