Football Season’s Bad Bet

This post originally appeared at https://wifamilycouncil.org/radio/football-seasons-bad-bet/

2024 | Week of September 2 | Radio Transcript #1582

Football season has arrived! The Packers’ and Badgers regular seasons are both opening within a week of each other, and the high school football season has been open for several weeks already. Many people watch sports year-round, but football’s popularity in Wisconsin is unmatched.

As much as I and many others love it, fall football can also threaten many families around the state. CTE and injuries aside, football brings with it a big increase in sports gambling. Almost one in five adults in America have bet money on sports just this past year. That’s one in five of your friends, your family, even fellow members of your church. Statistically, it’s almost impossible for someone close to you not to be gambling this season.

Sports gambling has been growing at a remarkable rate. Since 2018 when the Supreme Court legalized sports betting, Americans have spent over $235 billion dollars, almost $19 billion of which have gone to pure profit for the sportsbooks. If statistical trends are to be believed, this trend is likely to turn into over $100 billion dollars in profit very soon.  Wisconsin isn’t immune since Governor Evers has unilaterally legalized online sports gambling anywhere on a casino’s property.

It’s easy to forget that sports betting isn’t always done by people who have the money to throw around. Surveys have shown that the average sports gambler is a male under 45 years old. He may be a young father or a young son, draining the resources of his family on a risky, addictive game. Worse yet, he may be wasting money he doesn’t have, with almost half of sports gamblers going into debt for their betting. Far from good stewardship, sports gambling is a reckless challenge that many in our community may struggle with in some way.

More than anyone else, fathers have a particular responsibility to be good stewards of the resources they’ve been given. For all of us, and especially true for fathers, what we have is given to us by God for the good of our families and communities, and we must use it for care rather than waste. Young men have a responsibility to their wives and children, present or future, to be able to provide and care for them.

Gambling is often seen as harmless entertainment, not as something that can quickly and easily become an addiction. With so much of sports gambling taking place online, unless someone mentions their addiction, you may never know their struggle. Addiction to a hobby that nearly requires poor stewardship can force people to do things they would never do otherwise. Even our government and medical experts know that gambling can be a mental health problem that rises to the level of substance abuse.

The best way to stop this is to preempt it. If you are a parent, a teacher, a pastor, or anyone else in a position to mentor adolescents or young adults, you have an opportunity to keep this from being a problem for future generations. Teach them good stewardship, care of their finances, and the problems with gambling. Help them understand what the act of wagering repeatedly can do to a person’s mind and relationships. Most of all, help them understand what God calls them to do with money and all their resources: how He asks them to steward His gifts and help their neighbors, rather than bet on someone else’s success or failure.

Football season is an exciting time. For some people, it is a time to gather with friends and family to enjoy harmless entertainment together. For others, it is a time to risk their family’s financial security or their own futures on the actions of some other person playing a game with a oddly-shaped pigskin.

For the bookies, it is a time to rejoice and profit as more and more people fall for their schemes. The way to stop this or at least begin curtailing it is to cut it off at the root and teach every generation that sports are for fun, exercise, and time with family, not for financial risk.

Football season can be a really fun time in Wisconsin. Let’s each do what we can to ensure those coming after us who are especially vulnerable, don’t fall prey to the siren call of sports’ betting—for their sake and the sake of their loved ones.

For Wisconsin Family Council, this is Julaine Appling, reminding you that God, through the Prophet Hosea, said, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”