Journalists discuss rise of sports gambling among Gen Z

According to the Consumer News and Business Channel, 52% of Generation Z investors have redirected investment funds into sports betting. According to Fortune, 2 in 5 members of Gen Z consider sports betting an investment. The effects of this trend were recently discussed at a panel in the Eccles Conference Center at Utah State University.

McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic, presented alongside the panel about online gambling and what it’s doing to sports, culture and politics. Alongside him were USU staff and faculty, including deputy director of athletics/chief operating officer Ike Ukaegbu, assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health Science Francisco Javier Lopez Frias and professor in the Combined Clinical/Counseling Ph.D specialization in the Department of Psychology Michael Twohig.

Coppins spoke about his time spent over the course of a year gambling on sports to better understand sports gambling and its effects.

“I had assumed that the sportsbook was asking me a question: ‘How well do you know football?’” Coppins said about his experience. “That’s not the real question. The real question is, ‘Are you enough of a sucker to think you know more about football than the people who set these betting odds?’”

He went on to talk about a conversation with Nate Silver, a statistician and professional gambler.

“If you make one penny, that would make you better than 98% of people over a season,” Coppins said, quoting Silver.

To say why people participated in online gambling, Coppins also shared some preliminary, unweighted data from a new study by the Wheatley Institute. According to that data, half of the people surveyed have a gambling app on their phone. 40% of people say they gamble with the intent to make money, despite the extreme statistical improbability of winning, Coppins pointed out.

The survey also reported 85% of people who have a gambling app have deleted it at some point, with four-fifths downloading the app again after they delete it. Coppins pointed out this indicates a relationship between user and app where the user knows the app is bad and tries to stop but cannot.

Twohig talked more about why people are drawn to gambling apps and related it to pornography use.

“When you started having it, it was fun. It was useful, interesting, and now it’s your way of regulating emotion,” Twohig said about both sports betting and pornography. “You would think pornography viewing is really about interest in these sexual objects, but it’s not really. It’s really about people feeling distressed, and they feel uncomfortable. They feel anxious and overwhelmed, and these activities regulate that emotion for them.”

Ukaegbu shared his perspective on how sports gambling affects college athletes. He shared stories of players receiving threats because they didn’t perform how they should and lost someone a bet.

“There’s been times just at a previous institution, without naming which one, where one team was expected to win a game. I think they were favorites by — I forgot how many points, and they just got blasted that evening,” Ukaegbu said. “They got blasted from the start. You know, the opposing crowd was loud from the start. They were intimidating, and we just couldn’t figure it out that entire night.”

He then shared the impact of fans’ responses to the team.

“Our sports information director was sending me quite a few screenshots from betters — essentially those involved in sports with wagering because of them basically losing their bets that night, so you can just imagine in the sports book in Vegas, you have these guys and gals who are sitting in front of the sportsbook, probably a few beers in, watching the game, expecting to win money that night based on the team that was expected to win that night by a large amount,” Ukaegbu went on. “Next thing you know, they’re [direct messaging] these student athletes, they’re DMing these team accounts racial slurs, death threats for their families, calling them names that I haven’t even heard of, quite frankly.”

According to Coppins, this was not an isolated incident. He said more than one out of every three Division I basketball players have received threats from gamblers.

Sports betting at this scale is only a recent phenomenon. According to The Associated Press, the 2018 decision by the Supreme Court to strike down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which barred sports gambling in most states, has spurred on the extreme rise in sports gambling in recent years. According to Coppins, in 2017, the year before the Supreme Court ruling, sports gambling as an industry brought in $4.9 billion, and in 2025 it brought in $160 billion.

The recent rise extends to much more than collegiate athletics, as numerous professional leagues and teams in the United States and abroad have embraced partnerships with various betting and prediction market platforms since the 2018 decision.

Coppins closed his remarks by reminding everyone thinking about betting on sports that they are not just betting against the University of Georgia, the University of Alabama, or Brigham Young University, they are betting against companies with thousands of statisticians working for them. According to him, the casino has bet you are a sucker, and only you can prove them wrong.