October 22, 2024
By the numbers: Honors seminar tackles sports betting
Sports betting has been a hot topic over the past several years, especially with North Carolina legalizing online betting in 2023 and officially accepting bets this March.
Dr. Tom Robbins, associate professor in ECU’s Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management in the College of Business, was researching sports betting markets and looking at the application of efficiency to those markets. Through this process, he had the idea that the topic would be an excellent Honors College seminar course and is now teaching “Betting on Sports: By the Numbers” for the third time this fall.
Although this course does center around sports betting, Robbins’ goal is for students to learn a range of skills in the course that can be broadly applied to other courses and future careers.
“I’m really trying to teach them about probability theory and data analysis,” he said. “We talk about cognitive biases, about how people make irrational decisions based on emotion. We do talk about the ethics of sports quite a bit.”
One module of the course is dedicated to ethics and centers discussions on controversies that have arisen with players as well as addictions and problems with gambling.
“I’m not encouraging them to be sports bettors — I try to give them the skills that they would need if they wanted to do that, and also a realistic assessment of how difficult it is to be successful and some basic quantitative analytical skills they can use in any field,” he said.
Robbins noted that during the first day of class he asks students why they chose to take the course and it’s generally one of three answers: students who are already into sports betting and excited about the concept, those who like sports a lot but don’t know much about betting, and the smallest group comprised of students who thought this seemed like one of the more interesting honors seminars.
One of the intriguing aspects of the course is the semester-long contest where students use $1,000 of fake money to place bets. This helps students realize how difficult and risky betting can be.
“In the three times I’ve taught, I think the class generally as a whole usually breaks even, but a couple of students will make a decent amount and most of the students will lose a small amount,” he said.
Students have encouraged each other to take the course, especially if they want to improve their data and analysis skills.
“The sports betting seminar class throws you into the world of statistics in an interesting and engaging way,” said Sarah Maisto, senior marketing major. “We learned complex Excel skills by using records of sports history such as wins and losses or points scored in a game even dating back to the origin of the team. We also learned the different forms of sports betting and placed hypothetical bets to see how we would perform against our classmates; the entire point of this was to prove that it doesn’t necessarily matter how knowledgeable you are on sports when it comes to sports betting, most of the time it comes down to luck. We also dove into the business model of sports betting platforms, and we quickly learned the books will always win. Overall, this class was eye-opening to the industry of sports-betting, all while enabling me to hone my excel and statistics skills.”