Action’ Producer Bradley Jackson on the Odds of Texas Legalizing Sports Gambling
Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 law that prohibited sports betting in the majority of states (Nevada enjoyed an exclusion ). When that happened, the floodgates for legalized sports betting across the nation opened –Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island became the first to permit betting on the outcome of a game, but they are not likely to be the last.
Texas-based documentary filmmaker and UT grad 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 project. Reteaming with Dealt director Luke Korem and fellow manufacturer Russell Wayne Groves (in addition to showrunner David Check), Jackson produced the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, that monitored the winners and losers of the 2018-19 NFL season–not those on the field, but the ones in the casino, wagering a small fortune on the outcome of the matches being played. Texas Monthly caught up with Jackson ahead of the series’ final episode to chat about sports betting, daily dream, and what the chances are that Texas allows fans to place a wager on game day in the next few decades.
Texas Monthly: What did you learn from this job?
Bradley Jackson: Just how large a company this is. I mean, you find the amounts and they’re simply astronomical. From the opening paragraph of this series, when we’re showing these individuals gambling on the Super Bowl, that only on the Super Bowl alone, I think that it’s like six billion dollars. But then the caveat to that stat is that only 3% of this is legal wagering. Meaning 97 percent of action wagered on the Super Bowl is illegal. That amount from Super Bowl weekend was among the first stats that I saw when we were getting into this undertaking, and it blew my mind. Then you examine the real numbers of just how much is actually bet in the usa, and it’s billions and billions of dollars–and so much of this is prohibited wagering. So it seems like it’s one of those things everyone is doing, however, nobody really talks about.
Texas Monthly: Did working on this job inspire you to place any bets?
Bradley Jackson: Yeah. I hadn’t ever done it, and I’ve spent six months embedded within this world, I have made a few –low-stakes stuff, simply to get that feeling of what it is like. And it is fun, especially when you’re wagering a sensible amount–but the emotions are still there. I am a very emotional person, so when I lost my fifty-dollar UT vs. OU bet, I felt awful for about one hour. Because naturally I wager on UT, so when OU won, it hurt not only because my team dropped –it hurt more that I lost fifty bucks.
Texas Monthly: Do you have a sense of when placing a bet like that in Texas might be legal?
Bradley JacksonWe are living in a state that’s obsessed with sportsfootball especially. And nothing draws people’s attention more than gambling on football, especially the NFL. I think eventually Texas will do some kind of sport gambling. I really don’t know how long it’s likely to take. I believe they’ll do it in cellular, since I don’t think we’ll see casinos in Texas, ever. I’ve been hearing that maybe Buffalo Wild Wings is going to do some sort of pseudo sports betting stuff, which means you might go to Buffalo Wild Wings and get on your telephone and place a fifty-dollar wager on the Astros, and I feel that would be lawful one day. Probably sometime in the next five years.
Texas Monthly: With this industry 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 things?
Bradley Jackson: That will play hugely right into it. From a monetary perspective, it is enormous. Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, was sort of on the forefront of that. He wrote an editorial for the New York Times about four years ago where he said we need to take sports gambling from the shadows and bring it into the light. And that way you may tax it, which is always good for the countries, but you can also make sure it’s done over board. Once the Texas legislature sniff really how much money may be taxed, it is a no-brainer.
Texas Monthly: The prohibited bookie which you talk to in the documentary states that legalization doesn’t impact his organization. What was that like for you to understand?
Bradley Jackson: It blew me away. When we had been sketching out the characters we wanted to try and identify to spend the series, an illegal bookie was unquestionably at the very top of our list. Our premise was that this is going to hurt them. We thought we were going to find some New Jersey illegal bookie whose bottom line was going to be really hurt by all this. After we met this man, it was the specific opposite. He was just like,”I’m not sweating in any way.” I was shocked by it. He’d say he thinks that if each state goes, if this becomes 100 percent legal in every state, he then think that he could be impacted. But he operates from this Tri-State region, and now it is only legal in New Jersey, and just in four or five places. He breaks it down quite well in the end of the first incident, where he just says,”It’s convenient and it is charge –both C will never go away.” Having a illegal bookie, you are able to lose fifty million dollars on credit, and that can really negatively affect your life. Sometime you can still harm yourself betting legitimately, but you can’t bet on credit via lawful channels. If casinos begin letting you wager on credit, I think his bottom line could get hurt. The longer it is part of this national dialog, the more money he makes, as people are like,”Oh, it is legal, right?”
Texas Monthly: Is daily fantasy one of the gateways to sports gambling? It seems like it’s only a small variant on traditional gambling.
Bradley Jackson: In Episode 3, we follow one of the top five daily fantasy players in America. He’s a 26-year-old child. He makes millions of dollars doing that. He told us that the most he’s ever made was $1.5 million in 1 week. Among our hypotheses for the series was that the pervasiveness of everyday dream was a gateway into the leagues letting legalized gaming to actually happen. For years, you saw the NFL state that sports gambling is the worst thing ever and they would never let it. And then about four years back daily dream like DraftKings and FanDuel started, and they bought, I believe, 30,000 ad spots across the NFL Sunday platform. When you were watching the NFL, every other commercial was DraftKings or FanDuel. And a great deal of people were like,”Wait a minute, you guys say that you think sports gambling is the worst thing ever. What’s this not gambling?” It is gambling. We really join the CEO of DraftKings, and a couple of the high-up individuals at FanDuel, and I think it’s B.S., however they state daily fantasy isn’t gambling, it’s a game of skill. However, I really don’t think that is true.
Texas Monthly: How individuals who make money do it will involve running substantial quantities of teams to beat the odds, instead of picking the guys they believe have the best matchups this week.
Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our everyday dream player over a weekend of creating his bets, and he does not do well that weekend. And he talked about how what he is doing is a lot of ability, but every week there are two or three plays that are completely random, and they make his week or ruin his week, and that is 100 percent luck. That is an element of gaming, because you’re putting something of monetary value up with an unknown result, and you don’t have any control on how that is given. We watch him literally shed sixty thousand dollars on a three-yard run by Ezekiel Elliott. It is the Cowboys-Eagles, and he says,”All I want is to get the Cowboys to do nicely, but without Ezekiel Elliott making any gains, after which you see Zeke get, for example, a four-yard pass and he is like,”If one more of these happens, then I am screwed.” And then there’s this little two-yard pass away from Prescott to Elliott and he goes,”Well, I simply lost sixty thousand dollars right there.” 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 any cultural factors in the state that might make this more challenging to maneuver, or is some thing like that just a means of staking a claim to the cash involved?
Bradley Jackson: It could just be the pessimist in me, but think at the end of the day, a great deal of it just boils down to cash. An interesting case study is what happened in Nevada. In Nevada they left daily fantasy illegal, which can be crazy, because gaming is legal in Nevada. But they made it illegal since the daily fantasy leagues would not cover the gambling tax. So it was just like a reverse place, in which Nevada said,”Hey, this is betting, so cover the gambling taxes,” and DraftKings and FanDuel were like,”It’s not gambling.” And so they didn’t come to Nevada. I don’t think Texas will inevitably do it right off the bat, but I presume it in a couple years, when they determine just how much money there will be produced, and that there are smart ways to go about it, it’ll happen.
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