Wanna bet? Still illegal in Georgia (and SC) to bet Chiefs Super Bowl win plus Kelce-Swift proposal

Yahoo

06-02-2025

Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes faces a sea of cameras inside the Caesars Superdome during the Super Bowl Opening Night on February 3, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs were made available for interviews during an energetic, New Orleans-themed event ahead of next Sunday's Super Bowl LIX. (Photo by)
Who are you picking to win the Super Bowl?
You could bet the Kansas City Chiefs, but you'd have to spot the Eagles a point and a half. You could bet the over/under (the total number of points scored by both teams), which the sports books have set at 49. If you bet $100 that Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce scores a touchdown, you can win $125.
And if the Chiefs win AND Kelce proposes to Taylor Swift after the game – both have to happen — a $100 bet will pay off $750. Not enough to get you inside a Swift concert, but not bad.
In Georgia, though, you can't do any of that, not legally anyway. We're one of only 11 states, including neighboring South Carolina, that haven't legalized sports betting. And if we're smart, we'll keep it that way.
Sure, there's a lot of money to be made in betting sports, but not by you and not by me.
The house always wins, and since 2018, when the Supreme Court gave states the option of legalizing sports betting, the industry has been a profit machine.
They don't produce anything. They don't employ many people. But they do make a lot of money.
In 2023, according to the American Gaming Association, Americans spent $121 billion on sports betting, with industry revenue jumping 44% from 2022. We don't have numbers for 2024 yet, but the growth has only accelerated since then.
That kind of money and growth can generate a lot of lobbyist contracts and campaign contributions, especially in a sports-mad market such as Georgia.
Over the past seven years, state legislators have grown closer and closer to legalizing the industry here. Last year, legislation passed the state Senate and appeared close to passage in the House as well, but to use a football analogy, their red-zone offense faltered at the two-yard line, and they failed to convert.
A lot of the legalization push has come from Georgia sports franchises, which historically had seen gambling as a threat to the integrity of their sports and fought to keep it illegal.
Now, seeing the amount of money to be made through gambling ads and other revenue streams, they view it as an opportunity to make their highly profitable businesses even more lucrative.
Money talks, but sometimes what it has to say isn't pleasant.
The threat to integrity, for example, has proved real.
Over the past few years, we've seen major gambling scandals in the NBA, NFL, college sports, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer and UFC.
It has involved players, coaches, interpreters, girlfriends and even umpires and referees, leveraging their inside information or even changing outcomes to cash in on bets. Even when the games are played clean, desperate, frustrated gamblers are blaming athletes for their heavy losses, accusing them of throwing contests.
It has also come at an increasingly high social cost.
According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, the rate of gambling addiction related to sports betting is at least twice as high as other forms of gambling.
As states have legalized sports gambling, researchers have been able to watch the impact in real time. They look at various financial data before legalization, and then compare to data after legalization, and the results are sobering.
In one study released in October, for example, researchers found that when sports betting is legalized in a state, credit scores begin to fall.
'We find a substantial increase in average bankruptcy rates, debt sent to collections, use of debt consolidation loans, and auto loan delinquencies,' the study reports. 'We also find that financial institutions respond to the reduced creditworthiness of consumers by restricting access to credit. These results are substantially stronger for states that allow online sports gambling compared to states that restrict access to in-person betting.'
'Following legalization, sports betting spreads quickly, with both the number of participants and frequency of bets increasing over time,' a second study found. 'This increase does not displace other gambling or consumption but significantly reduces savings, as risky bets crowd out positive expected value investments. These effects concentrate among financially constrained households, as credit card debt increases, available credit decreases, and overdraft frequency rises. Our findings highlight the potential adverse effects of online sports betting on vulnerable households.'
The impact on boys and young men, avid consumers of a sports culture in which gambling talk is pervasive, can be particularly damaging.
As one anecdotal indication of the scope of the problem, I know of one family that opened an on-line betting account for their 11-year-old son, a situation probably being repeated many times over with unknown long-term consequences.
Part of the allure of sports is that you never know who's going to win, that anything can happen, even when your team is up 28-3 in the second half. In legalized sports betting, though, the final outcome never changes.
The house always wins.
Like the SC Daily Gazette, the Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: [e-mail].