Ask HN: Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news?

95 pointsNiceWayToDoIT75 comments

I just realized isn't id odd that worldwide there is a sport section as a part of daily news?

Relic of ancient times "bread and games" (panem et circenses), time when people were politically manipulated with biggest distraction. I am thinking there is no cooking news, or musical news... Sport news are about what other people do, not what we personally do. There is no science block, gaming block, music block ... but along weather there is sport section?!

I do not in this moment, I do not know, it just feel strange and off, is there anyone else who shares similar feeling?

Update: Sorry, for not being clear, I specifically meant TV news, you know prime time. News, from country to country the one it is on around 8pm each day...

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Daily news needs easy reliable filler material, and sports provide that.

Another commenter mentioned the stock market report. Again, easy reliable filler material. Despite the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has a tenuous effect at best for the vast majority of people, and despite the fact that it's not a great overall economic indicator, the news media report it because it's easy, and it changes daily.

Truly "newsworthy" stories are not guaranteed to happen every day. But the news media still need to fill space regardless. That's why they love things that reliably change on a daily basis. "Team A beat Team B" is such an easy story to write. It practically writes itself. Compare with true investigative reporting, which is extremely difficult, may take months or years, and may or may not have publishable results. How much investigative reporting can you do and still have a daily news report?

Why does the news media always cover elections as if they were horse races (and inevitably lament that in retrospect with crocodile tears for exactly 1 week after the election before forgetting and doing it again the same way the next election)? Because it's easy. You could say lazy. Candidate A is up in the polls this week, Candidate B is down. Such an easy story to write. You can keep taking polls, and keep publishing polls, and you've filled a bunch of news space cheaply.

Don't even get me started on how the "news" is now largely publishing tweets written by other people. The ultimate in journalistic laziness.

I agree with your general point. I would just add that I personally feel too much of the blame is placed on the media companies. They should get some blame, but ultimately they are providing what the consumer wants.

I feel the consumers deserve a large part of the responsibility. Too few people want to pay for quality news, or even simply give their attention to quality news.

The job of the news is to inform people (or more cynically, keep them watching to show ads). Sports are a major topic that a huge number of people want to be informed about. Why wouldn't they be in the news?

There are lots of things in the news that some people don't care about - they report on traffic (or at least they used to) even though many people don't commute. They report on the stock market even though many people aren't invested. These days they sometimes report on Bitcoin and other crypto, even though the vast majority of the world has no interest. Speaking of the world, they report on world news that most people don't care about, because they're only interested in their own country.

The news reports on things that people care about. A lot of people care greatly about sports. Just because you're not one of them doesn't mean it's strange to report on them.

They would be valuable news providers if that was all they did, but as is we can be sure that they only give you the news that attracts readers. Doesn't matter if it is important or not, the dumbest shit will get covered as long as it sells. And important news that doesn't sell doesn't get covered for the same reason.

I disagree that the job of news is to inform people. I think that it’s just a possible side effect that they champion in order to keep you engaged.

This feels like an incredibly cynical viewpoint. Nevertheless, would you say this also applies to non-profit news organizations like Propublica or forms of public media?

This may not apply to non-profit oriented media, and I also believe that in larger outfits you can find individuals that have a genuine goal of informing people but their views happen to be divorced from the true goals of the organisation. However even if they aren't looking for profits they will still have to compete for eyeballs, which might skew their behaviour. It's hard to find media that doesn't resort to clickbait.

Okay, fine, then the job of news is to get people to watch so they can sell advertisements. An enormous number of people want to watch news about sports. The logic doesn't change.

No, but I used to find it very odd as a child that a stock market report was part of the daily TV news. Sounds like you just don't like sport. Anyway, getting rid of a TV was one of the best things I ever did. Highly recommended. I watch a lot of movies, series, documentaries, but only the best, exactly when I want to see them.

We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. – Thoreau, Life Without Principle

Earl Warren, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, said that he always turned to the sports pages of the newspapers first: the sports pages were about humanity's victories, the front page mostly about its failures.

Sportsing a ball across a patch of grass into a special area isn't really much of a victory.

All but the most historic games are forgotten almost instantly, and even the most historic games have a very limited cultural life.

How many people care what happened in baseball in 1971 - never mind 1921?

Meanwhile those people are still reliant on applications of quantum theory, which was first described in 1900, even if they're not aware why it matters to them.

The bigger problem with sports is they encourage superficial tribalism and even racism.

This was very obvious in the UK during and after the Brexit debate. Vocal Brexiters seemed to think "winning" and "losing" were a team event, and most - especially those with football team flags on their Facebook profiles - literally didn't seem able to understand that there would be hard consequences for the country as a whole which went far beyond the immediate result.

How much relevance would ANYTHING on local tv (or even national) have in 100 years? That’s a weird bar to hit.

The weird bar is "on local TV". Keystone sports are mostly on national TV anyway.

But it just highlights that team sports are light entertainment dressed up as something more admirable.

If the media wanted to skew the balance they could concentrate more on individual amateurs.

Someone who goes from barely being able to run to a marathon is going to have an interesting and inspiring story. I'd be more interested in hearing about that kind of victory than the weekly/annual filler round of Famous Team A vs Famous Teams B-Z.

Not in the states, national TV almost never has sports. It's entirely politics.

1918 flu pandemic would be kinda relevant, don't you think

are you arguing for more coronavirus coverage? I don't watch sports but I think we're getting plenty of that.

> Sportsing a ball across a patch of grass into a special area isn't really much of a victory.

Wrong scale. Think smaller by several orders of magnitude. Think the daily life of someone with a dead end job, a wife they hate, and two awful kids. If their local team wins, that's a great victory by proxy. A victory to crow about with mates, a victory to tolerate a kid's failing grades, a victory to stoke the old love machine. We're tribal pack hunting monkeys. If our tribe wins, we win. And winning, of any kind, feels great.

In the US, national TV news is on around 6 or 7, before prime time, and doesn't cover sports. That's left to the local news broadcasts, which devote 5 minutes to it at the end of their early and late 30 minute broadcasts.

Local TV news in the US is fixated on weather, fires, car accidents, gruesome crime stories and so-called "human interest" stories, rarely covers local government. Now that's something I don't understand. Are we that shallow? The iconic local news image is that of a young cub reporter doing a video "standup" late at night in front of, say, a suburban home where a murder took place several hours previously. Why is it so important for everyone within 50 miles to hear about it?

Yes, people really are, by your value system, that shallow. The answer to any "are _x_ really that _y_" when the point of reference is informed by the tastes of _x_ is always "yes".

You can rightly say that those stories don't interest you. They don't interest me, and as such I don't watch a lot of local news. But there are huge swaths of people that do watch this content. That is why it exists.

It is like ads on the internet. They exist because they work on someone, even if they don't work on _you_.

Yes, I agree. Why is 30% to 40% of the time slot allocated to matters that are as ephemeral as the weather and of no long term consequence whatsoever? (For that matter, the weather segment has become much longer than it needs to be, but I digress). Afaict it's only bc it's cheap filler. Certainly most sports fans can either watch things as they happen, or can find out the results any time they want on the internet. Insofar as broadcast news makes any sense at all these days, more emphasis on information you might not otherwise seek, and that might matter beyond next weekend would be desirable

I assume you are joking about the weather, but either way... Before weather was freely available on computers or phones, it was useful to know what the weather was likely to be so you could plan local and/or national travel accordingly.

Idk about other areas but I suspect my local stations are fairly representative of at least the north eastern quarter of the US. All of them burn the better part of a minute with a 'teaser' piece that reveals essentially nothing, early in the half hour. Then about mid way through they burn what must be a solid 4 minutes at least with all manner of fluff. This is when there are no extreme events. If they just stuck to the next 24 hours, and then maybe a brief look at the "7 day" just for the general trends, they could stick that in place of the dreaded teaser, and even repeat it later (in case you missed it) and easily shrink it by 75%

True. The teasers are an unfortunate side effect of the primary goal of TV news, which is to sell ad slots. A family member did the weather graphics for a TV station years ago. I've sat on the set and in the control room a couple of times during a live broadcast. Everyone involved is really talented, and it's a shame that talent isn't devoted solely to the long-term benefit of the viewer and society.

Complaining about sports coverage is kind of like complains about “non-tech” articles on Hacker News. It’s there because people find it interesting.

People like sports, and there are new sports events all the time. They want to know what happened. Using “the news” to relay this information seems like a reasonable, entertaining and profitable way to do this.

There is absolutely cooking news, musical news, science news, etc. Which newspaper are you looking at?

Heading to NYT, I see: weather, biden, covid, trump, capital riot, zoom teaching, auto industry batteries, The Rock, prosecco, fashion advice, etc.

heading to NPR: weather, history, dinosaurs, mardi gras parades, pelosi, movies, parler app, obituary, romance, history

Yeah, I don't know if sports is really that "unique". The news is basically anything one of these websites puts up to capture attention and clicks and show ads. Sports is at a lull right now in USA, but it captures attention well, so people like to report on it.

People have a need to be part of a tribe, and sports is a healthy way to do that opposed to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s5zcXccNMY

Different people get different things out of it. Some people were involved in sports as youths or still play pickup basketball or soccer and that adds to the appreciation of the pro sport. Gambling on sports was huge even before they started to legalize it.

Let me guess, you don't follow sports? I know many, many people who do daily. Have you seen the episode of the IT Crowd where the guys get sports blurbs from. some website to recount to their coworkers to make them more popular? It's even been enshrined in pop culture how much the regular people is concerned with sports compared to the average "nerd". Just because you don't care does mean it's not enormously popular.

Just because you don't care does mean it's not enormously popular.

And, naturally, just because something's enormously popular doesn't mean it's worth caring about.

Yes, I also had this thought before. For me it was while listening to my favorite radio station. I could never understand why there would be a 5 minute (minimum) slot every hour dedicated to sport - something I have no real interest in.

No other hobby / form of entertainment / pass time gets this much airtime on such a regular basis.

It's even stranger now during Covid times. Where's the hourly eSports update?

You’re not alone. I think it’s strange too. There are a lot of strange things other folks find entertaining though.

Also for the record, I love playing sports. I’ve just never really understood sports spectators, nor those fans that rabidly follow sports stats. The caveat being I can understand parents watching their kids play, just not this whole watching strangers called “professional athletes” play sports.

I didn't used to. A couple of stats wonks helped me understand it.

Sports spectating is about stories. What ends up woven together out of individual matches is patterns, and humans love sussing out patterns and identifying them... There's a whole psychological reward system that is triggered by forming a prediction and watching it come true. So a lot of sports wonks watch for that hit... When their favorite player does his signature play, or their favorite team uses the strategy they've honed to a fine point to win a game.

In a sense, I personally watch SpaceX launches for the same thing. Does my day-to-day hinge on whether an additional 60 Starlinks get to orbit? Definitely not; I'm not in the aerospace field, and I'm fortunate enough to have a high-speed fiber landline plumbed into the side of my home by a previous owner. But I get to see whether the rocket will land this time (or, for that matter, whether it'll go up or something will violate expectations and the whole mission will go off the rails). I derive catharsis from the expectation / tension / satisfaction loop of a successful launch, landing, and deploy. It's a story of successful engineering.

Contrary to many other comment assumptions that I do not like sports, I do, but just struck me that it is similar like any other entertainment, movies, music, radio, internet ... but they do not have dedicated block each day.

News is entertainment and always has been. Since many people find sport entertaining, it makes sense to include sport in the daily news.

Ok, it is fine in papers, internet, but I am talking about prime time TV...

I think you answered your own question. Prime time TV = prime time entertainment slot.

Consider that by knowing someone's preferred source of news you can typically predict their political views with 90%+ accuracy, particularly if we're talking prime time broadcasting.

The news is meant to entertain: "To hold the attention of (someone) with something amusing or diverting.". To grip you, you're told stories about "your team" and its triumphs and tragedies. Sport is a relatively simple and benign aspect to all this.

In general (and some sports coverage does this), the rest of the recipe calls for outrage against "their team". It calls out their shenanigans and instills a sense of superiority over them. And as there is literally nothing you can do about any of this the only goal is to keep you coming back for more.

Perhaps in the past (... get off my lawn!) there were more attempts to inform people in a neutral sense. Maybe even to help people challenge their thinking and their bias so they're better equipped to negotiate disagreements in matters they can engage in and affect.

There's a movie you should see. It's called Network[1] and it was made in 1976. It deals with prime time TV news and how it is used to exploit people.

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/

> Howard Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

Not really. Sports are a fundamental part of every day life for arguably the majority of the population. I do think there is a hang over from the past though as arguably gaming or social media could be considered as such too.

What does grind my gears, however, is how the British media (including BBC News) think that the results of TV shows or the things that happen on soap operas are news. The fact that a person dressed up as a sausage won a TV talent contest or that a character died on Eastenders is not national news, IMHO.

That seems to be an extrapolation from sports news... It's all in the category of "reporting on entertainment."

I did think that after I posted the comment and have struggled to put my finger on just why it feels different to me. I am no sports fan, but a significant sports result nonetheless feels more like national news to me than the plot line of a TV show. This will give me some fun food for thought this evening :-)

If I read the consensus here correctly: Sportball-viewing is the largest US hobby -> something -> ergo news.

I have a couple of thoughts. First, can someone clarify what "something" is? Comments seem balanced between "you must not like sportball" and offering other information-ish things as evidence of, well, something. If the point is to qualify sportball as news, I'm unclear how those accomplish that.

Second, I expect comments to proceed to "Well, what is news anyway?" and here's what I have for that.

The extra-constitutional protections given to the press by the 1A imply a duty by news orgs to act as an adversary to Govs and other powerful interests - to unearth their misdeeds and other effects of public interest.

Reporting that honors press' 1A protections seems to unambiguously qualify as news. Reporting outside the scope of that may better qualify as information and/or entertainment.

No one is saying that information and entertainment shouldn't be published. However, universally cheap publishing provides endless sport/celeb/infotainment options to us. It is unclear how news orgs best serve us by redirecting resources away from 1A implied duties - just to provide the bazillionth option to hear about sport/celebs.

That's a mystery to me. I'm not interested in commercial sport at all. I never google games or scores or players. When I use Flipboard, it always, always inserts sport news into my feed no matter how hard I try to suppress, block, or mute sport topics in my feed. I start suspecting that it's some kind of sponsored promotion that obliges Flipboard to inject sport news into the feed.

As stated by another herein the "news" is just another business existing for profit. When you realize this you may reconsider the sources you digest as this partisanship received significant attention during the political escalation in the last years. What you consider news another in charge of publishing that content may not as how it relates to the business and their objectives. A very personal experience recently occurred where a local person was missing for over a week and the news covered the "missing" part. I participated in the search party and later that afternoon after searching a body washed up behind my house and of course such an event would be local front page news one would be led to believe correct? No, the "news" was not updated that a body was recovered for nearly one weeks time which to me should have been "news" the day of given that so many were aware and searching. Suspense sells and at the conclusion everyone loses interest.

It would be stranger if TV news or newspapers led with sports coverage. But they almost never do.

What is stranger by far, and more alarming, is the creep of soft news -- celebrity news and other "lifestyle" news -- from the end of the newspaper to the front page. Here is an example: "Trump Attacks Warriors’ Curry. LeBron James’s Retort: ‘U Bum’" [1]. In 2017, that article was front–page news in the New York Times [2].

It shouldn't have been. Tweets and celebrity news should almost never be prominently featured by a news organization. And this article was both: it was about a tweet by a celebrity, LeBron James. It was a story that might be suitable on the cover of People or a tabloid, but not for a serious news organization.

Which makes you wonder what has been happening to the Times.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/sports/football/trump-nfl...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/images/2017/09/24/nytfrontpage/scan....

Come to Southern Europe countries, where football is occasionally the only news you get to watch.

Not only the games, but what the players, their wives, kids, families, fan clubs, and whatever else are up to.

That wasn't a sports story. It was a political story. A political story should not be relegated to People or the lifestyle section just because it happens to involve famous athletes.

If that’s a political story, almost anything involving both a politician and a celebrity is a “political story.”

Think of all of the times that Trump tweeted something about a celebrity, or that celebrities tweeted about Trump. I don’t think it can be right to say that these were all newsworthy events.

But suppose that we restrict consideration to only those cases in which Trump tweets something about a celebrity (rather than a celebrity tweeting something about Trump). I think that even this more limited set of cases is rarely news – and almost never news worthy of the front page.

In this case, what was being tweeted about was politics. It's the content that makes it political, not who tweets it. The President was directly rebuking athletes for taking political positions that the President did not like, and they were responding to that criticism.

Yes: the content was political. The president was directly rebuking celebrities for taking positions that he didn't like, and one of them was responding directly. But that sort of thing happened almost every day in the Trump administration. On average, it happened more than once per day. And it generally happened via the shallowest of forums: Twitter.

It shouldn't be front-page news if it happens so frequently and through such shallow exchanges. Really newsworthy events are happening every day, but instead of covering them, the Times chose to put a Twitter squabble on its front page. I don't think that we can justify its decision just by noting that the content was political and that the parties to the dispute were prominent.

Sport is entertainment, and it is emotional, two excellent ways to get someone's attention

Problem: We need people to watch our TV news program so that we can entice advertisers to pay for ads.

Solution: Offer things people are interested in watching, like sports.

Basically enough people like watching sports news that it is worthwhile for news programs to offer coverage, so that they get more viewers and can command higher prices for commercial ads. It's as simple as that.

I think you're pretty much right about the bread and games comment. I think sports can be a big distraction from politics. I believe the White House invites championship teams to visit. So I think political manipulation is still a big part. You can find more evidence in the post-9/11 deals between the NFL and the government.

Just like politics can be a big distraction from the policies and governance that those pesky proles would demand otherwise?

I don't see much disconnect between politics and the policies/governance.

Most news is entertainment, in that people watch it to be distracted and entertained and not to be informed. That's why in local TV there'll be a bit about someone doing something horrendous or funny, but the boring and painstaking legislative fight over things that really matter get zero coverage.

If you look at the traditional ‘news’ shows you see at 10am or noon you’d see much less sports and much more ‘lifestyle’ news. This is largely a historical oddity based on work norms and who had free time to watch when.

In the modern world with 24 hour dedicated channels for effectively everything this is just tradition now.

There's a lot of that. Why are the Kardashians in the news? Why are movies in the news? Fast food restaurants? Vacation spots? The weather?

People are interested in various things. News is whatever people find interesting that shows up when you diff today vs yesterday.

It's a topic where there is often daily new events, and it brings an additional audience into the news broadcasts. I get that you don't particularly enjoy sports, but not every segment of the news needs to be for you.

There’s no code for what should be in the daily news. The news is a product like any other, so if something is in the daily news, that’s because it sells (or drives up engagement because the broadcaster is selling ads).

Sports is content. Sports provide relatively low-cost, widely available and reliably engaging content. Fill the timeslots, sell more ads.

Sports and weather. They tease it early and then show it last, because it's what people who watch local news watch it for.

But don't most respected newspapers have sections also for culture, literature, science etc.? I think they do

At that rate, why is politics in the news?

"Bread and games" was an worked as a political tool 2000 years ago, it works today, and it will be still work 2000 years in the future.

Anyway, from the top of NYT page:

> World / U.S. / Politics / N.Y. / Business / Opinion / Tech / Science / Health / Sports / Arts / Books / Style / Food / Travel / Magazine / T Magazine / Real Estate / Video

Cooking news is inside Food. Music news are inside Arts.

Science has it's own section, but I don't read it. (The Science block of the papers in my country are sometimes not very good. There is a lot of credulous copy&paste form PR, and technical words are replaced by inaccurate simplifications, so sometimes you have to decipher what was the original discovery. Also some Science hews are posted in the Health section if they are related to Medicine.)

An interesting part of sports is that they generate a continuous stream of random results. You can fill pages and pages writing the results and some ad hoc interpretation. If a team wins, it's because they changed the coach, if a team loose it' because one of the players is unhappy about the food in the training, whatever, it's very difficult to verify the hypothesis and people loves reading it and all the drama. https://xkcd.com/904/

I meant TV news.

TV news (at least in the European countries where I've lived) usually have some art/music (small, not regular) section.

Tv news is entertainment. Not news.

Bread and circus political distraction has never gone out of style.

Sports reporting makes perfect sense.

Not really. It sells papers. If there is a market for it, it will continue to be provided.

News companies are in the business of getting views and clicks, that's all.

Honestly not at all. What is actually more novel about the news today is the fact that it is no longer geographically local.

News is about finding things that concern/interest you. Hacker news, happens to be a place where I find lots of things of interest and some things of concern. I expect to see if my team won that day's match that night on the news.

Primetime news is no different. We want to know if our team won the game, so it is reported.

It's everything else on primetime news that doesn't make sense, or points to a serious issue.

It isn't that we _have_ sports on the news, the problem is what we _don't have_ on the news. That cheezy little bit about the old ladies down at the community center doing a bake sale for the school. We don't have the local farmer on talking about how the highway road closure is affecting him. Nothing about the local religious group doing homeless ministry, or the individual homeless on your specific streets.

What we have on the news: a bunch of things that our online lives have taught us are important, that drastically inform our online selves, how to speak, think, what is worrisome. And yet none of those things that our online lives tell us is so important, hardly affects our material lives, lived in our local geographic material area, at all.

We desire to be informed about the things that concern us. Our problem is we have made things that were never a concern to previous generations, our greatest concern, and the greatest concerns to previous generations, the least concern. At the very least previous generations and ours have enjoyed our local team's sports for whatever weird reason.

No one (should) give a crap if their neighbor is a Trump supporter or Biden supporter: Your neighbor needed a cup of some sugar to bake some cookies for the bake sale and you gave them some.

A lot of people like sport. If no one liked it it wouldn’t be there.

It’s actually the least strange thing about the news.

(And probably the most accurate)

I want video games in the news! :)

no, olympics and wine... to keep ppl on low income happy

Yes it is because a journalists job is pain tourism. I guess it needs some entertainment not to become a total doom story

There should be a "video games" section of the NY Times ;)

Even if you are not an avid sportsball fan, don't sleep on the sportsbook growth as legalization and even deregulation abound with the introduction of crypto. This is a triple digit growth year over year market through the foreseeable decade. And state tax revenue is usually allocated directly to education.

And there's plenty of interesting prediction science and forecasting math involved ;)

Sports betting's growth in U.S. 'extraordinary'

https://www.espn.com/chalk/story/_/id/29174799/sports-bettin...

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