All About Action: How Betting is Changing the Way That We Watch and Talk About Sports
Once a taboo subject in sports broadcasting, gambling is now an essential part of the machine, and its influence is only growing
I recently saw a post on X (formerly Twitter) about a recent college basketball game between Florida Atlantic and Loyola Chicago. What interested me about this game was not what was happening on the court but rather what was coming from the commentators of the game. This game was part of the Barstool Invitational. For those unaware, Barstool Sports is a digital media sports outlet that started as a free transit publication offering gambling advice and fantasy sports projections. It has since grown into a media behemoth characterized by loud and sometimes obnoxious personalities with a heavy influx of lewd content and attention-grabbing headlines.
Towards the end of the Florida Atlantic and Loyola game, Barstool veterans David Portnoy (the company’s CEO and founder) and Dan “Big Cat” Katz were yelling at FAU players to shoot the ball with an 18 point lead so that the bets that they placed would win. The commentary was rightly criticized by hoops fans on social media, but it underlies a reality in modern sports coverage and journalism: gambling is very much a cog in the machine whether we like it or not.
