The madness is at hand
Tourney means money flowing
Las Vegas ? Hours before the first game of the NCAA Tournament tips off Thursday, every seat will be taken in the Mandalay Bay sports book and people will be lining up at the betting windows with fistfuls of cash.
Those lucky enough to grab a table won’t leave until the night’s final game is over — or their bankroll runs out.
The hotel is all booked up, too, but if a room did become available it would run $599 a night.
Up and down the glittering Las Vegas Strip, the story is the same. Hotels will be packed, and so will the sports books, where many fans will spend the entire weekend watching and betting the games.
But betting on the NCAA Tournament is one thing that doesn’t stay in Vegas.
In dorm rooms, offices, and homes across the country, people can make a few clicks of the mouse and bet up to $10,000 or so on their favorite team.
And one out of every 10 Americans carefully will fill out their brackets, throw $20 or so in the office or bar pool and hope they can claim bragging rights and make a little money at the same time on what happens between now and April 4.
As much as the NCAA hates it — and hate it, it does — the madness this March extends far beyond the basketball court. Millions will reach into their wallets to back their teams and, for the first time, some say it’s possible more money will be bet on this year’s tournament than the Super Bowl.
Though figures are hard to come by because much of the money is bet privately, one Internet betting site estimated a staggering $3.5 billion — about the same as the gross national product of Mozambique — will be bet on the 63 games that will crown a college basketball champion.
“There’s a lot of people who will be betting every single one of these games,” said Stuart Doyle, wagering director at the internet gambling site BetWWTS.com. “People on the East Coast will sit at their dining-room table betting from 11 in the morning until one the next morning, then do the same thing again the next day.”
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Though this city’s sports books are the most visual epicenter of NCAA betting, the $80-90 million that bookmakers estimate they’ll take in on the tournament won’t come near what is wagered with Internet sports books.
And that figure itself is likely just a fraction of what is put into pools at bars, offices, college campuses — and even Major League Baseball’s clubhouses.
“I think every team does one,” San Diego Padres’ first baseman Phil Nevin said. “I guess it’s popular. We do them all year — Masters, the big golf tournaments, the NBA Finals, stuff like that.”
Nevin put together the Padres’ pool, where squares went for $100, and the winnings are based on final scores of games throughout the tournament, with $1,000 going to the championship-game winner. Though some younger players balked at the price, the 100 squares sold out.
“Oh yeah. Quickly,” Nevin said.
Though most of the pools are small and done mostly for fun and bragging rights, the NCAA staunchly opposes them, just as it does any other form of betting on college sports.
That’s one reason why Rick Neuheisel was fired from his job as Washington’s football coach after he won $12,123 in betting pools in the 2002 and 2003 tournaments.
“The point we’re making is, if you’re putting money at risk — whether it’s a dollar or $10,000 — it’s a violation,” said Bill Saum, the NCAA’s director of gambling activities. “No one thinks a dollar pool is going to have an impact on the integrity of a game, but our kids get so many mixed messages we don’t want to send any more.”
The NCAA has tried to get Congress to ban betting on college sports, and Arizona Sen. John McCain went so far as to introduce a bill in the last session to do just that. The bill died quietly, though, and there are no indications McCain will try again.
Saum believes there are good reasons to worry about betting on college sports. A survey the NCAA did last year found 17 percent of male athletes in Division I sports bet on college sports, while slightly more than 2 percent of basketball players said they were asked to influence the outcome of a game because of gambling debts.
Every team in the NCAA tournament will watch a video this week warning of the dangers of consorting with gamblers or making bets, and Saum and FBI agents will meet personally on the Friday before the Final Four with each of the remaining teams.
Meanwhile, betting has never been easier on tournament games, largely because anyone with Internet access and a few bucks can make a bet. Doyle said his company alone will take in up to $25 million on the games.
“It’s about 10 times what the size of the Super Bowl is for us,” Doyle said. “The Super Bowl is just one game, while March Madness lasts several weeks.”
Las Vegas sports books will likely total less than $100 million, but the first week of the tournament has grown into one of the biggest events of the year on the Strip. The Mandalay Bay has 4,766 rooms, but is sold out from Monday night through Saturday.
“It’s become one of our biggest weekends of the year,” spokesman Gordon Absher said. “If a room did become available it would be $599 a night and there’s a line of people waiting to pay that.”
Absher said last year some fans thought they would get a table in the sports book by staking it out at 3 a.m., only to find they were all taken. The same is true at the Stardust hotel-casino, where people who don’t even gamble come just to soak up the atmosphere.
“As soon as the first game tips off the crowd starts roaring like they are literally at the game,” said sports book director Bob Scucci. “They’re cheering every basket and the excitement never dies down because you always got another game going on. From an action point of view, nothing beats it.”