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 illegal sports gambling in most states (Nevada appreciated an exception). 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’re not likely to be the last.
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 betting for his follow-up to that undertaking. Reteaming with Dealt manager Luke Korem and fellow producer Russell Wayne Groves (as well as showrunner David Assess ), Jackson made the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, that monitored the winners and losers of the 2018-19 NFL season–maybe not the ones on the area, but the ones in the match, wagering a small fortune on the outcome of the games being played. Texas Monthly caught up with Jackson in advance of the series’ final episode to chat about sports betting, daily fantasy, and what the chances are that Texas enables fans to place a bet on game day within the next few decades.
Texas Monthly: What did you learn from this job?
Bradley Jackson: Just how big of a business this is. I meanyou see the numbers and they’re just astronomical. In the opening sentence of this series, when we’re showing these individuals gambling on the Super Bowl, that just on the Super Bowl alone, I think that it’s like six billion dollars. But then the caveat to this stat is that only 3% of this is legal wagering. That means 97 percent of all action wagered on the Super Bowl is prohibited. That amount from Super Bowl weekend was one of the very first stats that 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 actually bet in America, and it’s billions and billions of dollars–so much of that is illegal wagering. So it feels like it’s one of these 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 had never done it, and I’ve spent six months embedded within this world, I’ve made a couple–low-stakes stuff, simply to find that sense of what it is like. And it’s fun, especially when you’re wagering a sensible level –but the emotions are still there. I’m a really emotional person, so when I lost my fifty-dollar UT vs. OU bet, I genuinely felt awful for approximately an hour. Because naturally I wager on UT, so when OU won, it hurt not just because my team lost–it hurt even 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 live in a state that’s obsessed with sportsfootball especially. And nothing draws people’s attention more than gambling on football, especially the NFL. I believe finally Texas will do some sort of sports gambling. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. I think that they’ll do it in cellular, since I do not think we’ll see casinos in Texas, ever. I have been hearing that maybe Buffalo Wild Wings is going to do some type of pseudo sports betting stuff, which means you might go to Buffalo Wild Wings and get in your telephone and set a fifty-dollar bet on the Astros, and I feel that will be lawful one day. Probably sometime in the next five decades.
Texas Monthly: With this business being huge, prohibited, and thus largely untaxed, to what extent do you believe gambling as a source of untapped revenue for your country plays into matters?
Bradley Jackson: That will play hugely into it. From a financial point of view, it is huge. 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. That way you can tax it, which is obviously great for the countries, but then you may also make sure it’s done over board. Once the Texas legislature sniff how much money may be taxed, it’s a no-brainer.
Texas Monthly: The prohibited bookie which you speak to in the documentary states 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 characters we wanted to try and identify to spend the show, an illegal bookie was definitely on very top of our listing. Our premise was that this will hurt them. We believed we were going to find some New Jersey illegal bookie whose bottom line was going to be really hurt by all of this. After we met this guy, it was the exact opposite. He was just like,”I am not sweating at all.” I was really shocked by it. He did say that he believes that if every state goes, if this becomes 100 percent legal in every nation, then he think he could be affected. But he works from the Tri-State area, and now it’s only legal in New Jersey, and just in four or five places. He breaks it down really well in the end of our first episode, where he just says,”It is convenient and it is credit–the two C will never go away.” With an illegal bookie, you can lose fifty thousand dollars on credit, and that may really negatively impact your life. Sometime you can still harm yourself betting legitimately, but you can’t bet on credit through lawful channels. If casinos start letting you bet on charge, I believe his bottom line might get hurt. The more it’s part of the national dialog, the more money he makes, because people are like,”Oh, it is legal, right?”
Texas Monthly: Why is daily dream among those 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 fantasy players in America. He’s a 26-year-old child. He makes millions of dollars doing this. He told me that the most he has ever produced 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 gambling to really happen. For years, you saw the NFL say that sports betting is the worst thing and they would never allow it. And about four years back daily fantasy like DraftKings and FanDuel started, and they bought, I believe, 30,000 advertisement spots across the NFL Sunday platform. When you’re watching the NFL, every other commercial was DraftKings or FanDuel. And a great deal of folks were like,”Wait a minute, you guys say that you think sports betting is the worst thing ever. How is this not gaming?” It is gambling. We actually join the CEO of DraftKings, and two of the high-up people at FanDuel, and I think that it’s B.S., however they say daily fantasy isn’t gambling, it’s a game of skill. However, I don’t think that is true.
Texas Monthly: How individuals who make money do it tends to involve running substantial quantities of teams to win against the odds, rather than choosing the guys they believe have the best matchups this week.
Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our daily dream player above a weekend of creating his stakes, and he does not do well that weekend. And he talked about how what he’s doing is a lot of ability, but every week there are just two or three plays that are entirely random, and they make his week or ruin his week, which is 100 percent luck. That is an element of gaming, as you’re putting something of financial worth up with an unknown result, and you have no control on how that is awarded. We watch him literally lose 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 perform nicely, but without Ezekiel Elliott making any profits, after which you see Zeke get, for example, a four-yard pass and he is like,”If one more of those happens, then I’m screwed.” And then there is this tiny two-yard pass from Prescott to Elliott and he goes,”Well, I simply dropped forty thousand dollars .” And you watch $60,000 jump from an account. There.
Texas Monthly: Ken Paxton has argued that daily fantasy is prohibited in Texas. Are there cultural factors in the state that might 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 at the end of the day, a lot of it just comes down to cash. A fascinating case study is exactly what occurred in Nevada. In Nevada they left daily dream illegal, which is mad, 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 position, where Nevada said,”Hey, this is betting, so pay the gaming 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 think it in a couple years, when they determine just how much money there will be made, and there are clever ways to go about it, it is going to happen.
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