‘I couldn’t stop’: Atlantic journalist shares insights from his brief sports betting spiral

“Don’t be a sucker.”

These were the final words of advice journalist McKay Coppins gave at the end of a lecture that morphed into a sort of confession about his own unexpected spiral into America’s sports betting industry.

Gambling is a vice that “rots the soul,” Coppins said, citing the “millennia of accumulated wisdom” that points to gambling as ruinous to people and civilizations.

For several months last year, Coppins — a practicing Latter-day Saint who never pictured himself a gambling man — embedded himself in the sports gambling scene.

His motives were initially strictly journalistic. He had set out to report on the nation’s sports betting boom, and his editors at The Atlantic suggested he experience the industry firsthand for research.

After several considerations, Coppins accepted, and The Atlantic handed him $10,000 to wager over the course of an NFL season.

Coppins expected the experiment to be a “funny journalistic gimmick” that would take up only a few paragraphs of his reporting. By the end of his experiment, Coppins found it hard to walk away, he confessed Wednesday in a lecture at Brigham Young University.

“I wanted to keep going,” Coppins said. “I couldn’t stop.”

Coppins chronicled his research and gambling journey in a long-form article for The Atlantic. The article, titled “Sucker: My year as a degenerate gambler,” received significant national attention after it was published in March.

In a lecture organized by BYU’s Wheatley Institute, Coppins retold his journey and explored the pitfalls and impact of sports gambling on individuals and society.

The state of sports gambling in the U.S.

Turn on any game now and it’s evident something has changed about the United States’ relationship to gambling, Coppins said.

Sports games on any channel, at any time of day, now bombard viewers with ads for sports-betting apps, he said. Athletes and hall of famers “who a generation ago would have been selling Wheaties or sneakers are now being paid millions of dollars to persuade people to download gambling apps.”

“Virtually every sports media outlet in the country takes sponsorship money from gambling companies,” Coppins continued. “Even the leagues themselves are in the tank.”

Coppins quoted a former ESPN reporter who wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, saying: “Gambling touches everything. The betting apps are in charge now, and everyone knows it.”

Sports betting has transformed the nation, he said. In 2017, a year before the Supreme Court overturned the federal ban on sports betting, Americans legally wagered about $4.9 billion on sports. In 2025, Americans wagered at least $160 billion.

‘I couldn’t stop’

The “explosive growth” of the nation’s sports gambling industry prompted Coppins to report on the phenomenon and its impact.

What Coppins wasn’t expecting was the impact his “most bizarre” career assignment would have on him, his psyche and his loved ones.

“One of the first things that gambling did to my brain,” Coppins said, was transform “a $20 profit into a hypothetical kitchen renovation.”

The potential gains and investment in games he would otherwise not truly care for made things exciting. “It was fun,” Coppins said.

A practicing Latter-day Saint, Coppins first ran the experiment by the bishop who led his congregation before jumping in. His bishop cleared the experiment, understanding Coppins would be gambling with his employer’s money — and not his own — for research purposes.

Still, the bishop’s last words to Coppins before he set off were, “Be careful.” Coppins admitted he shrugged the words off rather smugly, thinking: “This is not gonna be an issue for me.”

“In retrospect, I shouldn’t have,” he said.

Coppins first began betting more as a recreational sports gambler, punching in bets at random. With time, research and multiple interviews under his belt, he began mastering the industry’s vocabulary and making more educated bets.

At one point, Coppins even found himself up a few hundred dollars. “I went on a little winning streak and started wondering if maybe I was a sports betting savant who had just discovered my gift in middle age,” he said.

“That’s an embarrassing sentence to say out loud, but it’s actually how I was thinking — and that’s the trick,” he added.

Coppins learned quickly that the sports betting industry is not interested in its users’ success, nor was it built for users to make a profit.

The question the industry is asking isn’t, “How well do you know football?” Coppins said. It is, “Are you enough of a sucker to believe that you know football better than the people who set the betting lines?”

The industry is betting on suckers and recreational gamblers, he said. “Your mistakes are valuable to them. Your confidence in your own ability is how they make money.”

Even as Coppins learned this and understood from an early interview that if he were to make only one penny he would be better off than 98% of people over an entire season, he was still hopeful he could beat the odds.

Amid his betting losses and victories, Coppins noted “something weird” was happening to him.

Gambling began occupying more and more of his mental space, he said. He was listening to gambling podcasts in the shower, watching five football games at once every Sunday, and routinely staying up past midnight scrolling through DraftKings and FanDuel.

By the end of the NFL season, Coppins had lost $9,891 of the $10,000 he started with.

“Sitting there that morning, the money wasn’t the thing that frightened me most, because really, it wasn’t even my money,” Coppins said. “What bothered me was that I wanted to keep going. …

“My gambling experiment was supposed to end with the NFL season, but the morning after the Super Bowl, I found myself scrolling through the FanDuel and DraftKings apps and thinking, ‘Those March Madness odds look pretty interesting.’

“I couldn’t stop. … I knew how the trick worked, and I still wanted to keep gambling.”

Gambling’s threat to society

“For most of American history, we’ve had fences around gambling,” Coppins said.

Sports betting apps have, practically overnight, “taken an ancient vice, put it on everybody’s phone and made it as normal and frictionless as checking the weather,” he said.

Other gambling platforms have likewise opened the gates for people to gamble on basically anything.

“You can gamble on how warm it will get in LA tomorrow, or when Taylor Swift will announce her pregnancy,” Coppins said. You can gamble on “whether the U.S. government will reveal proof of extraterrestrial life or whether Jesus will return to Earth before 2027.”

People may also gamble on “darker things,” like whether Gaza will experience famine in 2026 or when a nuclear weapon will be detonated somewhere in the world, Coppins said.

“These platforms are obviously ripe for abuse with people with inside information,” Coppins explained, “but to me, there’s also just something toxic about turning every world event into a Las Vegas table game.”

Coppins invited listeners to imagine the thoughts of someone betting on one of these darker scenarios if they came true.

Would their thoughts race to fear or concern for the people impacted? Or would there be “a little flash of ‘I was right,’ or even worse, ‘How much money did I just make?’”

The logic and ethos of gambling are “permeating every aspect of culture in American life,” Coppins said. “And there is something fundamentally dehumanizing about it.”

Half of all 16- and 17-year-old boys gamble, according data from Common Sense Media. Nearly two-thirds of college students place bets and 70% of American adults report gambling at least once a year, according to a recent study in the Journal of Gambling Studies.

Where’s a guardrail?

Coppins advised those interested in or tempted by gambling to consider why prediction markets and the sportsbooks would want their money.

“Just think realistically about how this industry works,” he said. “It’s unlike any other industry in the world where it only works if you are losing money.”

The truth about gambling is that bets aren’t just against sports teams.

“You’re betting against companies with armies of statisticians and enormous quantities of behavioral data,” Coppins said. “You’re betting against software designed to remove every bit of friction between an impulse and a wager.”

As a society, “we’re betting that we can reap the rewards of a runaway gambling industry without paying any price.”

The gambling industry, meanwhile, has “bet that you are suckers,” he said. “You get to decide whether they’re right.”