Why a Tennessee proposal to ban sports betting on campus is too little, too late

In the months after a 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the door for states to legalize sports betting within their borders, giddy lawmakers across the country couldn’t move quickly enough. No one wanted to miss out on the billions of dollars in tax revenue that the high court had suddenly placed within their reach—or, worse yet, to watch that easy money go to neighboring states whose leaders had the presence of mind to move first. Within a month of the decision, Delaware Gov. John Carney bet $10 on a Phillies game—the first legal single-game sports bet outside of Nevada.

Many states were more concerned with getting sportsbooks online in time for a big-ticket event (the Super Bowl, March Madness) than building an infrastructure to regulate the multibillion-dollar industry—a dynamic that journalist Danny Funt details in his book Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling. Lawmakers in some states even passed laws authorizing sports gambling before the Supreme Court decided Murphy v. NCAA, so they’d be ready to jump after a favorable ruling.

Eight years later, it’s clear that this gold rush has had (and I am being diplomatic here) some negative consequences. Sports media outlets have become hopelessly intertwined with gambling behemoths eager to turn more fans into paying customers. Athletes who do not perform to bettors’ satisfaction are often subjected to racist abuse, death threats, or some combination thereof. And gambling addiction has spiked, thanks to the proliferation of app-based mobile betting that allows users to get their fixes anytime, anywhere. 

A 2025 study found that internet searches for help with gambling addiction increased 23% between 2018 and June 2024, and that they surged more with the arrival of online sportsbooks than they did when brick-and-mortar casinos opened.

Over the last few years, a series of high-profile scandals have demonstrated the extent to which legalization has warped the actual games on which people are betting all this money. In 2024, the NBA issued a lifetime ban to Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter for his part in a conspiracy in which he pulled himself early from games to ensure that “under” bets on his performance would hit. Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier was implicated in a similar scheme last year, as were two Cleveland Guardians pitchers who were charged with rigging ball-or-strike bets on specific pitches in exchange for cash bribes.

Then, earlier this month, federal prosecutors named 39 players across 17 teams who were allegedly part of a point-shaving ring that fixed men’s college basketball games during the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons. According to the indictment, bettors offered players bribes in the low five figures to underperform in agreed-upon games, and then wagered heavily on outcomes they had good reason to believe would go their way. 

Leagues and sportsbooks typically frame corruption as rare and make examples of those who are involved in it. But the mere knowledge that scandals like this exist can throw the entire enterprise into doubt: If you are a gambler who is angry about a bad bet, it’s very easy to wonder if you were cheated by perpetrators who were just lucky enough not to get caught.

A new bill in Tennessee, where residents wagered $1.3 billion on sports over a two-month period last year, is maybe the most significant effort yet to retreat from the status quo. Introduced by a pair of Democratic lawmakers, state Rep. John Ray Clemmons and state Sen. Jeff Yarbro, the proposal would ban state-licensed sportsbooks from taking bets from people who are on the campuses of public colleges and universities, as well as from people at venues where those schools’ teams are playing games.

Sportsbooks use the geolocation capabilities of smartphones to determine app users’ eligibility, so logistically speaking, rejecting bets from phones that are located within newly designated restricted areas would not be especially complicated. Colleges and universities would also be required to block people from accessing online sportsbooks while connected to campus networks. 

A handful of states have previously imposed modest limits on betting on college sports—for example, banning proposition bets on college athletes, or prohibiting wagering on in-state school teams. The scope of Clemmons and Yarbro’s proposal is broader: It would prevent people on campus from placing any type of sports bet, college or otherwise.

The rationales for targeting restrictions at college students are straightforward: Gambling addiction has hit young people hard, and young men the hardest. A Pew Research Center study last year found that 31% of adults between ages 18 and 29 had bet on sports in the previous year—the most of any age group. A 2023 survey commissioned by the NCAA found that more than a quarter of college-age adults had placed a bet online, and overall, 58% had bet in some form. In 2024, a Pennsylvania addiction therapist told 60 Minutes about a troubling new archetype of patient he’d encountered in recent years: college students who gamble away their federal student loan money. 

Clemmons echoed many of these concerns in an email to me, explaining that he was motivated by rising addiction rates among young people, sportsbooks’ efforts to target young people with advertising, the ongoing harassment of student-athletes, and “a desire to prevent students from losing their parents’ hard-earned money to sportsbooks.” If you are a policymaker looking to enact more robust protections for those whom the data shows are most vulnerable, “the people who are physically present on a college campus” is a pretty good place to start. 

At the same time, the bill’s parameters demonstrate the challenges inherent in trying to provide oversight to an industry that has, to date, been allowed to set a new land-speed record every year. Bettors have long demonstrated their willingness to move around in order to place bets. In his book, Funt writes that before New York authorized sports betting, New York City residents would simply walk across the George Washington Bridge until their phones registered their presence in New Jersey, where betting was legal. Given what we know about how addiction works and how prevalent it is, I’m not sure that requiring college students to cross the street in order to place a wager is going to be, in the scheme of things, a significant deterrent.

It’s also worth contemplating all the people and behaviors to whom this law would not apply. It doesn’t affect private schools, which means that while students at the University of Tennessee might be temporarily locked out of their FanDuel accounts, students at Vanderbilt might not even realize if and when a ban takes effect. It doesn’t affect private property, which means that students who live off campus would be free to continue wagering from the comfort of their couches. It doesn’t affect access to federally regulated prediction sites like Kalshi, which function as backdoor sportsbooks accessible to anyone 18 and older. 

Since Tennessee already prohibits anyone under 21 from betting with state-licensed sportsbooks, the people who would be barred from wagering under this law and who are not barred from wagering under existing law are, basically, fans at certain sporting events, and college juniors and seniors at public schools, if they happen to be on school property at that moment.

By email, Clemmons noted the legislature’s limited jurisdiction over nonpublic property, and he asserted that geo-targeting campuses and sports venues “seems the most effective, legal way to accomplish our primary aims.” In response to my question about the merits of, for example, raising the minimum betting age or barring college students from betting regardless of their physical location, Clemmons said that if they pass this law and determine that “more action is necessary,” they will “certainly look to have those discussions.”

I don’t mean to suggest that lawmakers considering responses like this one to the various crises before them are falling down on the job. When there is this much evidence over this many years that the post-Murphy free-for-all is ruining this many lives, I would prefer people in power do what they can to mitigate the harm rather than shrug their shoulders and do nothing. 

I’m simply saying that at this point, eight years after the Supreme Court empowered the gambling industry to begin swallowing sports whole, it is going to be really, really challenging for lawmakers, in Tennessee or anywhere else, to start putting the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube. 

This is largely the result of the states’ own choices: They could have proceeded more cautiously after Murphy, by more aggressively limiting the pools of eligible bettors, or imposing more onerous tobacco-style restrictions on sportsbook advertising, or simply deciding to wait a little while before putting virtual casinos in millions of pockets. But they wanted the money that would come with acting fast.

Now, they’re paying the true price.

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