Action’ Producer Bradley Jackson on the Odds of Texas Legalizing Sports Gambling
Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 legislation that prohibited sports betting in most states (Nevada appreciated an exclusion ). When that occurred, the floodgates for legalized sports gambling across the country opened –Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island became the first to allow betting on the outcome of a match, but they are not going to be the final.
Texas-based documentary filmmaker and UT graduate Bradley Jackson, who made the surprise hit Dealt, about a blind San Antonio card shark, spent much of the past six months immersed in the world of sports gambling for his followup to that undertaking. Reteaming with Dealt manager Luke Korem and fellow manufacturer Russell Wayne Groves (as well as showrunner David Check), Jackson produced the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, which monitored the winners and losers of the 2018-19 NFL season–maybe not those on the area, but the ones in the match, wagering a small fortune on the results of the games being played. Texas Monthly caught up with Jackson in advance of the series’ final episode to talk about sports gambling, daily dream, and what the odds are that Texas allows fans to put a wager on game day within the upcoming few decades.
Texas Monthly: What did you learn from this job?
Bradley Jackson: How big of a business this is. I mean, you find the numbers and they are simply astronomical. From the opening paragraph of this show, when we’re showing these individuals betting on the Super Bowl, that just on the Super Bowl alone, I think it’s like six billion bucks. But then the caveat to that stat is that just 3 percent of this is legal wagering. That means 97 percent of action wagered on the Super Bowl is illegal. That number from Super Bowl weekend was one of the very first stats I saw when we were getting into this project, and it blew my mind. And then you look at the real numbers of just how much is really bet in America, and it’s billions and billions of dollars–so much of that is prohibited wagering. So it seems like it is one of these things everyone is doing, however, nobody really talks about.
Texas Monthly: Did working on this job inspire you to put any bets?
Bradley Jackson: Yeah. I had never done it, and I’ve spent six months embedded within this world, I have made a few –low-stakes stuff, simply to find that sense of what it is like. And it is fun, particularly when you’re wagering a reasonable level –but the emotions are still there. I’m a very mental person, so when I dropped my fifty-dollar UT vs. OU wager, I felt awful for approximately an hour. Because of course I bet on UT, so when OU won, it hurt not only because my team lost–it hurt more that I dropped fifty dollars.
Texas Monthly: Do you have a feeling of when putting a wager like that in Texas might be legal?
Bradley Jackson: We are living in a state that’s obsessed with sportsfootball especially. And nothing draws people’s attention over betting on football, particularly the NFL. I think finally Texas can perform some kind of sport gambling. I really don’t know how long it’s going to take. I believe they’ll do it in mobile, because I don’t think we will see casinos in Texas, actually. I have been hearing that maybe Buffalo Wild Wings will do some sort of pseudo sports betting stuff, so you could go to Buffalo Wild Wings and put on your phone and set a fifty-dollar wager on the Astros, and I feel that will be lawful one day. Probably sometime in the next five years.
Texas Monthly: With this business being huge, prohibited, and so largely untaxed, to what extent do you believe gambling as a source of untapped revenue for the state plays into matters?
Bradley Jackson: That will play hugely right into it. From a financial point of view, it is enormous. Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, was kind of on the forefront of that. He wrote an editorial for the New York Times about four years ago where he said we will need to take sports gambling out of the shadows and then bring it into the light. And that way you may tax it, which is obviously good for the countries, but then you can also make sure it’s done above board. When the Texas legislature sniff how much money can be taxed, it is a no-brainer.
Texas Monthly: The prohibited bookie which you talk to in the documentary says that legalization doesn’t impact his business. What was that like for you to learn?
Bradley Jackson: It blew me off. When we were sketching out the figures we wanted to attempt to determine to spend the show, an illegal bookie was definitely at the top of our listing. Our premise was that this is going to hurt them. We believed we were going to find some New Jersey illegal bookie whose bottom line was going to be very hurt by all of this. After we met this guy, it was the exact opposite. He was just like,”I’m not sweating in any way.” I was really shocked by it. He did say that he thinks that if every state goes, if this becomes 100% legal in every state, then he think that he might be impacted. However he works out of this Tri-State region, and now it’s only legal in New Jersey, and only in four or five places. He breaks it down quite well at the conclusion of our first incident, where he simply says,”It is convenient and it is credit–both C will never go away.” With an illegal bookie, you are able to lose fifty million dollars on credit, and that may really negatively impact your life. Sometime you can still hurt yourself betting legally, but you can not bet on credit via lawful channels. If casinos start letting you wager on charge, I believe his bottom line could get hurt. The longer it’s part of this national dialog, the more money he gets, as people are like,”Oh, it is right?”
Texas Monthly: Why is daily fantasy among the gateways to sports gambling? It feels like it’s just a small variant on traditional gaming.
Bradley Jackson: In Episode 3, we follow one of the top five daily dream players in America. He is a 26-year-old kid. He makes millions of dollars doing this. He advised me that the most he has ever made was $1.5 million in one week. Among our hypotheses for the series was that the pervasiveness of everyday fantasy was a gateway into the leagues allowing legalized gaming to really happen. For years, you saw the NFL state that sports betting is the worst thing and they’d never allow it. And then about four years back daily dream like DraftKings and FanDuel began, and they bought, I think, 30,000 ad spots across the NFL Sunday platform. When you’re watching the NFL, every other commercial was DraftKings or even FanDuel. And a lot of folks were like,”Wait a minute, you guys say you think sports gambling is the worst thing ever. What’s this not gambling?” It is gambling. We really interview the CEO of DraftKings, and a couple of the high-up people at FanDuel, and I think that it’s B.S., however they say daily dream isn’t gambling, it is a game of skill. But I don’t think that’s true.
Texas Monthly: How people who make money do it will involve running substantial numbers of teams to win against the odds, instead of picking the men they believe have the best matchups this week.
Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our everyday fantasy player over a weekend of creating his stakes, and he does not do well that weekend. And he talked about how what he is doing is a lot of skill, but every week you will find two or three plays that are entirely random, and they make his week or ruin his week, and that is 100 percent luck. That really is an element of gaming, as you’re putting something of financial worth up with an unknown result, and you have no control over how that is given. We see him literally lose sixty thousand dollars on a three-yard run by Ezekiel Elliott. It is the Cowboys-Eagles, and he states,”All I want is for the Cowboys to perform well, but minus Ezekiel Elliott making any gains, and then you see Zeke get, like, a four-yard pass and he’s like,”If one more of those happens, then I’m screwed.” And then there’s this tiny two-yard pass from Prescott to Elliott and he goes,”I just lost sixty thousand dollars .” And you watch $60,000 jump out of an account. There.
Texas Monthly: Ken Paxton has contended that daily fantasy is illegal in Texas. Are there cultural factors in the country which may make this more challenging to maneuver, or is some thing like that just a way of staking a claim to the cash involved?
Bradley Jackson: It might just be the pessimist in me, but believe in the end of the day, a great deal of it just comes down to money. An interesting case study is what happened in Nevada. In Nevada they left daily fantasy illegal, which is mad, because gaming is legal in Nevada. Nevertheless, they made it illegal since the daily fantasy leagues would not cover the gaming tax. So it was just like a reverse place, in which Nevada said,”Hey, this is gambling, so cover the gaming taxes,” and DraftKings and FanDuel were like,”It’s not gambling.” And so they didn’t come to Nevada. I really don’t think Texas will necessarily do it right off the bat, but I think it in a few years, once they determine just how much cash there is to be made, and that there are clever ways to go about it, it’ll happen.
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