Action’ Producer Bradley Jackson on the Odds of Texas Legalizing Sports Gambling

Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 legislation that prohibited sports gambling in the majority of states (Nevada appreciated an exception). When that happened, the floodgates for legalized sports betting across the country opened up–Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island became the first to permit gambling on the result of a match, but they’re not likely to be the final.
Texas-based documentary filmmaker and UT graduate Bradley Jackson, who produced the surprise hit Dealt, about a blind San Antonio card shark, spent much of the past six months immersed in the world of sports gambling for his followup to this undertaking. Reteaming with Dealt manager Luke Korem and fellow manufacturer Russell Wayne Groves (in addition to showrunner David Check), Jackson made the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, that monitored the winners and losers of the 2018-19 NFL season–maybe not those on the field, but those at the casino, wagering a small fortune on the outcome of the matches being played. Texas Monthly caught up with Jackson ahead of the series’ final episode to talk about sports betting, daily fantasy, and what the odds are that Texas enables fans to put a bet on game day in the upcoming few years.
Texas Monthly: What did you learn from this job?
Bradley Jackson: Just how large a company this is. I mean, you find the numbers and they’re simply astronomical. In the opening paragraph of the show, when we are showing these individuals betting on the Super Bowl, that just on the Super Bowl alone, I think it’s like six billion dollars. But then the caveat to that stat is that only 3 percent of that is legal wagering. Meaning 97 percent of action wagered on the Super Bowl is prohibited. That amount from Super Bowl weekend was among the very first stats I saw when we were getting into this project, and it blew my mind. And then you look at the actual numbers of how much is actually bet in the usa, and it’s billions and billions of dollars–and so much of that is prohibited wagering. So it seems like it’s one of those things everybody is doing, but nobody really talks about.
Texas Monthly: Did working on this project inspire you to put any bets?
Bradley Jackson: Yeah. I hadn’t ever done it, and I’ve spent six months embedded within this world, I have made a couple–low-stakes things, just to find that sense of what it is like. And it’s fun, particularly when you’re wagering a reasonable level –but the feelings are still there. I’m a really mental person, so when I lost my fifty-dollar UT vs. OU wager, I felt awful for about one hour. Because naturally I bet on UT, so when OU won, it hurt not only because my team dropped –it hurt even more that I dropped fifty bucks.
Texas Monthly: Do you have a sense of when putting a wager like that in Texas might be lawful?
Bradley Jackson: We are living in a country that is obsessed with sportsfootball especially. And nothing draws people’s attention over betting on soccer, particularly the NFL. I believe eventually Texas will do some kind of sport gambling. I really don’t know how long it’s likely to take. I believe they’ll do it in cellular, since I do not think we’ll see casinos in Texas, ever. I’ve been hearing that maybe Buffalo Wild Wings will do some type of pseudo sports betting stuff, so you might go to Buffalo Wild Wings and put in your phone and set a fifty-dollar wager on the Astros, and I feel that will be lawful one day. Probably sometime in the next five decades.
Texas Monthly: With this business being huge, prohibited, and thus largely untaxed, to what extent do you think gambling as a source of untapped revenue for the state plays into things?
Bradley Jackson: This will play hugely into it. From a financial perspective, it is huge. Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, was sort of on the forefront of that. He wrote an editorial to the New York Times about four years ago where he said we need to take sports gambling from the shadows and bring it into the light. That way you may tax it, which is always great for the states, but you can also make sure it’s done over board. When the Texas legislature sniff how much money can be taxed, it is a no-brainer.
Texas Monthly: The prohibited bookie that you talk to in the documentary states that legalization doesn’t impact his organization. What was that like for you to learn?
Bradley Jackson: It blew me away. When we were sketching out the characters we wanted to attempt to determine to spend the show, an illegal bookie was definitely on very top of our listing. Our assumption was that this is going to hurt them. We believed we were going to find some New Jersey illegal bookie whose bottom line was likely to be very hurt by all of this. After we met this guy, it was the exact opposite. He was like,”I’m not sweating in any way.” It shocked me. He’d state he believes that if every state eventually goes, if that becomes 100 percent legal in every state, he then think he might be affected. But he works out of this Tri-State region, and right now it’s only legal in New Jersey, and just in four or five places. He breaks it down really well in the end of the first episode, where he just says,”It’s convenient and it is credit–both C will never go away.” Having an illegal bookie, you can lose fifty million dollars on credit, and that may really negatively impact your life. Whereas you can still harm yourself betting legitimately, but you can’t bet on credit via legal channels. If casinos begin letting you bet on charge, I believe his bottom line could get hurt. The more it’s part of the national conversation, the more money he gets, as people are like,”Oh, it is right?”
Texas Monthly: Why is daily dream one of the gateways to sports betting? It seems like it is only a small variant on traditional gaming.
Bradley Jackson: In Episode 3, we follow one of the top five daily fantasy players in the us. He is a 26-year-old child. He makes millions of dollars doing this. He advised me that the most he has ever made was $1.5 million in one week. One of our hypotheses for the series was that the pervasiveness of daily dream was a gateway into the leagues allowing legalized gambling to really happen. For many years, you noticed the NFL state that sports gambling is the worst thing ever and they would never let it. And then about four years ago daily fantasy like DraftKings and FanDuel started, and they bought, I think, 30,000 ad spots across the NFL Sunday platform. When you’re watching the NFL, every other commercial was DraftKings or FanDuel. And a great deal of people were like,”Wait a minute, you guys say you think sports gambling is the worst thing ever. What’s this not gaming?” It is gambling. We really interview the CEO of DraftKings, and two of the high-up people at FanDuel, and I believe that it’s B.S., but they state daily dream isn’t gambling, it is a game of skill. However, I really don’t think that is true.
Texas Monthly: How people who make money do it tends to involve conducting substantial quantities of teams to beat the odds, rather than picking the men they think have the best matchups this week.
Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our everyday dream player above a weekend of creating his stakes, and he doesn’t do well that weekend. And he talked about how what he’s doing is a lot of ability, but every week there are two or three plays which are completely random, and they either make his week or ruin his week, and that is 100 percent luck. This is an element of gambling, as you’re putting something of monetary value up with an unknown result, and you have no control on how that’s given. We see him literally lose sixty million dollars on a three-yard run by Ezekiel Elliott. It is the Cowboys-Eagles, and he says,”All I need is to get the Cowboys to do well, but minus Ezekiel Elliott producing any profits, after which you see Zeke get, for example, a four-yard pass and he is like,”If one more of those happens, then I’m screwed.” And then there is this little two-yard pass from Prescott to Elliott and he goes,”I simply dropped forty thousand dollars right there.” And you observe $60,000 jump out of an account. There’s no way that is not gaming.
Texas Monthly: Ken Paxton has argued that daily fantasy is illegal in Texas. Are there cultural factors in the state which may make this more challenging to maneuver, or is something similar to that just a way of staking a claim to the cash involved?
Bradley Jackson: It could just be the pessimist in me, but think in the end of the day, a great deal of it just comes down to money. An interesting case study is what happened in Nevada. In Nevada they left daily fantasy illegal, which can be mad, because gambling is legal in Nevada. Nevertheless, they made it illegal because the daily fantasy leagues wouldn’t pay the gambling tax. So it was like a reverse place, in which Nevada said,”Hey, this is betting, so pay the gambling taxes,” and DraftKings and FanDuel were like,”It is not gambling.” And so they didn’t come to Nevada. I really don’t think Texas will necessarily take action right off the bat, but I think it in a few years, once they determine how much cash there will be produced, and there are smart ways to go about it, it’ll happen.

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