March Madness has wrapped up and Caitlin Clark has emerged as a household name as well as a wealthy student athlete. Earning over $3 million throughout her college career, her success stands in stark contrast to the previous notion that collegiate athletes shouldn’t earn anything beyond their scholarship.
Straight Arrow News contributor Larry Lindsey examines the shift that has turned college sports into a big business and sheds light on the winners and losers in this changing landscape.
Now there’s yet another source of money for all of this, and that is gambling. Consider gambling on just the LSU-Iowa game. Caitlin Clark was, of course, the Iowa star. She had national recognition. Eighty percent of the bets placed on that game were placed on Iowa because of Caitlin Clark.
Now, there’s another big winner in all this, aside from the gambling enterprises and the students and the coaches and the universities. And this one is going to make sure that everything stays running just swell. And that’s the states, the states tax gambling, in particular online gambling.
In the third quarter of last year, states collected $500 million in taxes, just in that quarter, from online gaming. That’s a lot of money, but they’re not about to give up. All sounds like a winner — throw states in as winners along with the colleges, the athletes and the coaches, and the broadcasters, and the gambling associations, and who’s the loser?
Well, the fact is, gambling is an addictive sport. You may have seen all those sites run helplines: “[If] you’re [a] problem gambler, call this number for help.” Well, again, gambling is an addiction. Addicts tend not to think they have a problem. And if they do, it’s going to need more of a push than just an advertisement telling them a number or call in order to fix it. So the number of gambling addicts in the country is going to increase. No one wants that, but also nobody, especially the state governments who would regulate it, are going to do anything to touch the goose that’s laying the golden egg.Â