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Baseball is back. Although my beloved Toronto Blue Jays have gotten off to a rough start with half the heroic World Series team out with injuries, they’re still not as bad as the New York Mets. After signing our former shortstop, the Mets somehow managed to lose 12 in a row in April. The streak began the day Mayor Mamdani posed for a photo with the team. Curse of the Mambino? asked the New York Post. Nearing the streak’s merciful end, the New York Times mistakenly reported that the 11th straight loss occurred on Monday. So the Old Gray Lady published this uncharacteristically colorful correction:
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated which day the New York Mets suffered their 11th straight loss. It was on Sunday, not Monday. Even the Mets cannot lose on an off day.
The great thing about the return of baseball is that – in a span of a few weeks – it goes from nowhere to everywhere. Not just major league ballparks, but schools and little league fields. Up in Portland, OR, my college roommate Dave Friedman is a huge baseball fan and fortunate to have a son, Graham, who’s a terrific high school pitcher. While Graham delivers swing-and-miss, Dave keeps score and announces team games over the P.A. One recent zinger after a foul ball slammed onto the hood of a parked car: “Don’t worry, folks. That’s a lacrosse parent. We all know they can afford it.”
Dave saves his tastiest announcements to promote the team’s Snack Shack, run by other parents. He’s renowned for hawking Cup of Soup in very hot weather. And for nonsensical bargains e.g., “Welcome to the 5th inning. So it’s time for the 5-5-5 special. If you order 5 hot dogs, the Snack Shack will take 5 cents off.” But at a recent game midway through the season, Dave opened some eyes – and closed some stomachs – with this announcement:
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s official. The Snack Shack has just sold the last of the 2025 hot dogs. The 2026 hot dogs are now on sale.
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You can’t bet on high school baseball, at least not yet. But you can bet on college games. Low-friction sports gambling apps like DraftKings and FanDuel lay odds on college football, basketball, baseball, softball, soccer, hockey, volleyball, and even the rich kids’ sport (lacrosse). The ball got rolling in 2018 when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal law banning sports gambling and allowed states to set their own rules. The aftermath was a race to the bottom with many states competing for tax revenue. Since then, some have tightened restrictions and the two largest never budged. But while sports gambling is still illegal in CA and TX, betting on professional – and college – sports has become the norm in 39 states plus DC.
Because the gambling age is 21 everywhere except three small states (NH, MT, WY) and the apps are required to be strict on geolocation and age verification (including requiring and checking SSN), they didn’t become endemic on college campuses. This didn’t stop the NCAA from sounding the alarm in a 2023 survey finding that 60% of 18-22 year-olds were betting on sports, including 67% of students living on campus. Note that only about 20% of gambled with any frequency, 80%+ of wagers were small, and “gambling” included fantasy sports and March Madness pools. Nevertheless, the NCAA rightly barred all student athletes, coaches, and staff from gambling on any sport, even professional sports.
Thanks to DraftKings and FanDuel, betting on sports has gone from low-friction to no-friction With 94% of bets now made on apps, sports gambling has exploded from $5B annually pre-legalization to over $150B today: 30x in less than a decade. With similar growth in betting on college sports (from ~$1B to ~$40B today), there are millions of unhappy losers, some directing their ire at college athletes. A 2025 NCAA survey found 7% of Division I athletes receiving negative or threatening messages from fans who bet on their game, including 36% of men’s basketball players and 16% of football players. With the rise of prop bets – gambling on the performance of individual players or the occurrence of specific events – harassment can be intense. Student athletes have been pressured to provide inside information and some have received demands to pay gambling losses, threats to their pets, and death threats.
But for colleges and universities, the sports gambling problem was limited to top student-athletes before the rise of no-friction prediction market apps like Kalshi and Polymarket, which allow bets on the outcomes of sports events and almost anything else. These apps fall through a regulatory loophole because prediction apps are classified as financial derivatives contracts and regulated at the federal level by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The upshot for higher education is that states are prohibited from setting rules, so 18-year-olds are now fair game for what the Wall Street Journal calls “gambling by another name”.
Last September, Kalshi posted on X that “college campuses are the best place to spark new financial movements and will play a key role in bringing the next 100M users to prediction markets.” Both companies are building relationships with campus poker clubs and investment clubs, sponsoring events and paying for new signups. Predictably, fraternities are the top target. According to the Wall Street Journal, one day last fall Polymarket invited Columbia’s Sigma Phi Episilon chapter to its New York office, fed them pizza and wings, gave them $10 codes to begin betting, and then sent the frat a wooden plaque recognizing them as “the first Polymarket Pledge Class.”
At my request, my nephew Evan, president of his fraternity at ASU, passed along what he deemed “the Epstein files of prediction markets” i.e., a barrage of texts and emails from Polymarket’s regional growth manager:
Although the Journal reports that one frat raised over $30K, that frat is not my nephew’s. On March 17, Evan responded to the Polymarket growth manager: “It’s just hard to get people to install a gambling app. People are hella wearing the hats tho.”
Beyond harassing fraternity presidents, both companies have been paying student influencers – especially student athlete influencers – for promotion and sharing student gambling success stories on social media. In response to the Journal article, Kalshi claimed its marketing “isn’t focused specifically on college students.”
While we’ve been distracted by prediction apps’ rampant insider trading scandals – including a special forces sergeant betting on the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, Israeli soldiers gambling on strikes against Iran, congressional candidates wagering on their own races, and tampering with weather monitoring stations – the bigger issue is imminent danger to an already challenged generation. While there aren’t any surveys or studies yet on prediction apps’ prevalence on campus – and you can bet your bottom dollar that the NCAA will be producing one soon – their growth rate is off-the-charts and given the high-pressure tactics, a disproportionate share that growth has to be coming from colleges and universities. Gambling on sports (and everything else) is becoming part of the fabric of college life.
As colleges are overrun by Kalshi and Polymarket, you don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict ill tidings. First, college students, particularly male college students, are famously bad at weighing risks. There’s a brilliant filmography on the subject (see e.g., Animal House, Revenge of the Nerds, Old School). Or just stop by your nearest fraternity row on a Friday or Saturday night. But these risks are primarily physical and likely of limited duration. They don’t extend to the financial sphere where prediction app odds are not in students’ favor. A Journal analysis this week found three losers for every winner on Kalshi and a similar ratio on Polymarket where 67% of profits are being captured by just 0.1% of accounts, which the Journal characterized as “sophisticated pros—including trading firms with access to vast streams of data.” Casual traders “have no chance, systematically,” said one expert. As a result, gambling on prediction apps can result in permanent harm like debt, dropping out, and a need to take the first job on offer rather than searching for the best opportunity.
Speaking of jobs, pre-prediction markets, few students thought they’d build a career from betting on sports, or anything else. But prediction apps blur the line between investing and gambling. Gambling may be a problem, but isn’t investing a career? According to the NCAA’s top risk management official, “anything that blurs the line between financial investing and gambling, especially for a young and vulnerable population, is really dangerous.” And because prediction apps feel more like investing than gambling, they may be even more addictive.
A decade ago, college students dreamed of making a living as a social media influencer or playing eSports. Apparently the new way to make a living without working is placing bets on prediction apps. Just observe and speculate. It’s all apiece; no need to create or add value.
With the rise of prediction apps, what happens in college no longer stays in college.
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For once, this isn’t the fault of colleges and universities. But what should they do about it? The only position the NCAA has taken is urging the CFTC to bar college sports from prediction apps. That may be what’s firmly in the NCAA’s province, but it’s not a serious response to the crisis. Higher education can do more than publish NCAA surveys. College leaders need to unify around an anti-prediction apps message – that these are gambling apps, not “markets” and definitely not investing – both externally and internally to students. Communicating this message federally and at the state level should be a priority. Meanwhile, on campus, schools have jurisdiction over student organizations. They should bar clubs and fraternities from promoting Polymarket and Kalshi. And enrolled students shouldn’t be permitted to receive payments for making influencer videos on behalf of gambling apps. Finally, sadly, gambling now needs to join the ranks of substance abuse and consent awareness and support programs.
While federal courts will have their say – a number of judges have already indicated that gambling apps vs. prediction apps is a distinction without a difference – we may have to wait until 2029 for a national fix. Under the Trump administration, the CFTC is zealously protecting its authority to pre-empt state law, filing suit over jurisdiction against AZ, CT, and IL. You might not be surprised to learn that Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in Polymarket and an adviser to Kalshi.
But until gambling apps like Kalshi and Polymarket stop plundering college campuses, students face significant financial and career harm. As if enrolling in college wasn’t enough of a gamble.