HARDBACK
ODDS ILLUSTRATES THREAT TO COLLEGE BETTING
BY DOUG FRENCH

To coincide with college basketball’s March Madness, political madness reappeared this year as ex-Nebraska football coach Rep. Tom Osborne re-introduced a bill that would ban betting on all college sports, including the venerable 65-team NCAA basketball tournament — now the second largest betting event in Nevada behind the Super Bowl. 

“Gambling creates an unhealthy climate in amateur sports where the emphasis goes from appreciation for excellence and skill to point spreads and monetary gain,” Osborne said in a statement. 

Osborne introduced a similar bill two years ago. Thirty-three other members of the House backed the bill, but it was never scheduled for a congressional hearing. 

In January 2000, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback also introduced legislation banning betting on college sports. Ironically, hearings for that bill were scheduled for March of that year, but were canceled as relevant witnesses were busy during the NCAA tournament. 

The political threats to college betting serve as a small part of the backdrop for Chad Millman’s book The Odds: One Season, Three Gamblers and the Death of Their Las Vegas.

Millman weaves an engrossing tale by threading stories of the mercurial lives of gamblers Alan Boston, Rodney Bosnich and Stardust Casino Race & Sports Book Manager Joe Luppo together as they experience near misses, bad bounces and dysfunctional personal lives during the 1999-2000 basketball season. 

What Millman makes clear is that despite the puffery of politicians, it is gambling combined with the creation of ESPN, and that fledgling network’s need for programming, that has made college basketball as popular as it is.

It seems like a million years ago that ESPN bought the rights to televise regular season games and the early rounds of the NCAA tournament. “It was had for a song because no one wanted it,” ESPN’s Bob Levy told the author. It doesn’t go for a song anymore; CBS Sports pays the NCAA $6 billion for the exclusive right to televise the NCAA men’s basketball tournament until 2014. If office pools, bracketology and legal betting were banned, would enough people watch the games to make the rights worth $6 billion?

Players choose colleges for immediate playing time, national exposure and TV time. Having a few bucks on a game makes people want to watch; ESPN (and now other networks) provides the coverage, and suddenly Siena, Gonzaga, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and other small schools have attracted great players, built solid programs and are often Cinderella tournament threats. 

The primary theme of Millman’s book (published in 2001) was that the good old days of Las Vegas being the capital of sport betting were ending. Offshore books in Antigua would continue to siphon off more betting action, the big corporate gaming companies were lowering the amounts that gamblers could wager on individual games to decrease risk (sending big bettors to Antigua) and Congress might take away a third of Nevada sports book action by banning bets on college games. 

The fact that this dour view has not materialized does not make The Odds any less fun to read or valuable for its insights.

Casual bettors will gain a better understanding into how betting lines are set — and especially changed — which makes the book worth its price. The conventional wisdom is that bookmakers in Las Vegas set betting lines attempting to have even money bet on each side of a game and thus to pocket just the vigorish.

But as the book constantly illustrates, sports books in Nevada rarely have equal money on either side of a game or proposition. Thus, sports book directors, far from being uninterested observers as to the outcome of games, have their career futures in the hands of erratic young college students.

Thus, it is not just money that moves lines, but often who is betting. A small bet from a Vegas wise guy can make a sports book manager quickly rethink his line, while large amounts of money from tourists and ignorant punters will not move a line at all.

The book’s greatest drama is provided by the potential million-dollar exposure the Stardust sports book had on the St. Louis Rams/Tennessee Titans Super Bowl. The Stardust had booked significant future action on the Rams to win the Super Bowl at odds starting at 200-1. Suffice it to say, it was a tumultuous day for Stardust book managers Joe Luppo and Bob Scucci with a happy ending.

The Odds is a great read that provides both the romantic and ugly sides of the sports betting life. LW