![]() ![]() There is the capacity to see every fantastic finish in your living room or on the computer screen in your office cubicle. There is the perceived innocence of the collegiate athlete and the nobility of amateurism. There is the allure of Cinderella, the glorious possibility of David slaying Goliath that is largely absent in professional sports. “It really does become this perfect storm,” says Tim Otteman, a member of the Central Michigan University faculty who has extensively researched sports gambling. “It’s a bundle of needs that is being satisfied,” says Andrew Yiannakis, a professor at the University of New Mexico who founded the National American Society for the Sociology of Sport in 1978. It makes no sense, and it makes perfect sense. They’re talking about Georgia Tech’s matchup zone, about Wisconsin’s swing offense, about whether the 13th-seeded Siena Saints can upend No. 4 Purdue after star forward Robbie Hummel tore ligaments in his right knee. People suddenly know the difference between Wofford and Winthrop (both are in South Carolina). TV ratings are closer to soccer and hockey numbers than major pro sports - the Atlantic 10 Tournament championship on Sunday drew an anemic 0.3 Nielsen rating in San Diego - until this spike in the NCAA Tournament, when viewership can be five, eight, even 10 times higher. The bizarre part is that college basketball, for the most part, is only marginally popular the rest of the year. President Barack Obama even fills one out. An MSN survey found 45 percent of Americans will enter at least one pool, and 20 percent will fill out three or more brackets. The NCAA says one in 10 Americans, or about 30 million people, will fill out an office pool or some other form of bracket this week. It is considered second only to football’s Super Bowl in dollars wagered by Americans, both legally and illegally, and some gambling experts think it has passed the NFL’s annual showcase. A Chicago outplacement firm estimated $3.8 billion in lost national worker productivity - roughly the annual gross domestic product of Laos - over the three-week, 64-game tournament that crowns the season’s college basketball champion. This drop in research activity in these libraries is quantitative evidence of the NCAA Tournament’s power to influence patterns of work.”įew, if any, sporting events grip the nation like March Madness does. “I observed similar patterns in each of the three years, 2006 to 2008,” Charles Clotfelter said, “and the post-selection dip occurred in both libraries not connected to universities with Division I teams as well as those with them. ![]() Only about $100 million of that is bet legally in Las Vegas, the rest coming mostly in office pools.Ī professor of public policy at Duke examined data from 78 research libraries across the United States and discovered that the number of scholarly articles viewed noticeably dropped in the week when the 65-team field for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament is selected and the opening rounds are played. There is no verifiable statistic about how much is bet each year on the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, but various estimates range from $2.5 billion to $12 billion. “At a time when we can’t keep car thieves, multiple DUI offenders and armed robbers in prison,” Jeffries said in a statement last year, “it is silly to continue to threaten people with jail time for buying a $5 square at a Super Bowl party.” ![]() Margaret Hamblin and another woman were fingerprinted, booked and fined $130. Now sports betting pools under $2,500 are considered an infraction with a maximum fine of $250.Īssemblyman Kevin Jeffries (R-Lake Elsinore) proposed the amendment after a 73-year-old grandmother got popped for running a $50 football pool - 10 entries for $5 each - at the local Elks Lodge in 2007. Before, violators faced a misdemeanor or felony charge punishable by fines up to $5,000 and/or a year in prison. 1, when AB 58 went into effect and essentially decriminalized noncommercial sports betting pools that are not conducted for profit. You just didn’t commit as serious a crime as it used to be in California. That March Madness office pool you just entered for $10? You just broke the law.
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