SPORTS BETTING PAYS OFF.

• Author: Boehm, Eric
• Position: REGULATION - Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic

THE ANNUAL MARCH Madness college basketball tournament has long been associated with sports betting, thanks to ubiquitous but technically illegal bracket pools in offices and bars. But this year's tournament was different.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire event was played in Indiana. It was the first time that the NCAA had held any part of its biggest annual event in a state with legal sports betting--a reversal from previous NCAA policy. That's a big deal not because of what happened but because of what didn't.

This year's NCAA basketball tournament, which concluded on April 5 with Baylor University claiming its first national championship by throttling previously undefeated Gonzaga University, was not marred by scandal or corruption. There were no reports of thrown games or bribed refs. Contrary to the fears underlying the NCAA's longstanding policy, the first major intersection of college basketball and legal sports betting seems to have been a completely clean affair.

For years, anti-gambling scolds warned that legal betting would be a disaster for sports leagues and especially for college athletics. Because college players are unpaid amateurs, the argument went, they would be easy marks for bookmakers trying to influence game outcomes.

"Professional and amateur sports leagues need to recognize that legalized sports gambling will put both the lives and livelihoods of their athletes at risk," John Kindt, a University of Illinois business administration professor who has testified against legalized gambling in multiple states, warned in 2018. That was just before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a 1992 federal law that effectively banned sports betting outside of Nevada. Maintaining that ban, he argued at the time, was a "national imperative."

The longtime Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell worried that legal sports betting would "turn our arenas, stadiums, and ballparks into new kinds of casinos." The "most disgusting" part, he wrote in a 2018 column, was that "sports-gambling pushers will come right out in daylight, not even pull a gun, and say that they would love to assist in creating a world" where you can bet on everything from the outcome of a game "to whether the next free throw will be made or not."

You couldn't quite...