It wasn't the most typical of assignments: McKay Coppins got dispensation from his bishop along with a $10,000 stake from his bosses at the Atlantic to explore the world of online sports betting. In a first-person piece for the magazine, Coppins, a married father of four and practicing Mormon—thus the need for his bishop's blessing—explains how he used the money to bet on games over the NFL season to better understand the boom in legal sports wagering. At first it was mere entertainment, he writes: small bets, a few wins, and the thrill of watching games with money on the line. But the apps—stuffed with promotions, bonus bets, and endless wagering options—quickly turned gambling into an all-consuming habit. "You're addicted," his wife whispered to him in church when she spotted him checking his DraftKings app.
Instead of watching football casually, Coppins found himself obsessing over odds, scores, and potential parlays. Across the season—and $28,000 in total wagers—Coppins threads his own slide toward compulsion through a bigger story: how sports leagues and gambling companies have teamed up to turn a vice "long regarded as soul-rotting" into a constant activity as "frictionless as checking the weather." Coppins, for one, is worried about a potential generation of addicts emerging. Meanwhile, a small slice of problem users drives huge profits, and integrity scandals chip away at fans' trust in games. By season's end, Coppins had lost his employer's $10,000 stake. The piece ends with him getting ready to fill out a "self-exclusion" form to prevent the apps from letting him wager. Read his full story.
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