I remember back when I was in sixth grade a friend of mine tried to start a rotisserie baseball league. This was about 1988 or so... ancient history when it comes to fantasy sports. And the dawn of time, to boot.
I was in, as were a number of our friends, and we all stuck with it for a couple of months before it petered out. It wasn't from lack of interest; rather, it was a lack of time to organize and collate all the stats that come through the agate pages on a daily basis. People today don't remember, but believe me, rotisserie leagues were a real time sink back in those days.
The interenet changed everything. Sites like ESPN and Yahoo sports set up all the statistics for you, crunch whatever numbers you want, rank draft prospects, set up schedules, give you private web pages you can use for your league, and more. There's no more crunching stats; there's only reading what the computer gives you. It's so freaking easy.
And this has led into a boom in sports gambling over the last twenty years. With football betting taking a very prominent position at the head of the pack.
A simple google search of the phrase football betting brings back nearly eight million hits. Everything from sites that explain the rules of prop bets such as over/under, laying or taking points, teasers and more, to sites that are dedicated rotisserie leagues, to more and more and more ways to bet your cash on whatever you want whenever you want.
And football betting has become big, big business. Back in the 1980s, when my young friends and I were putting together our short-lived baseball rotisserie league, football betting in the united states was maybe somewhere around one hundred million dollars a year. Not exactly chump change, but not an entire industry, either.
In this day and age, more than two billion dollars per year are bet on football, and that's just the legal bets. The FBI estimates that there's an additional one point five billion dollars a year in illegal, off the books football betting that takes place. In other words, the industry has grown by more than three thousand percent in the past two decades.
And I admit I've yet to take part in it even though I'm a pretty big sports fan. Maybe it was my brief and painful flirtation with online poker (quickest $250 I ever lost) that's kept me away.