Sports Betting Behavior Among College Age Men (2023)
Undergraduates: Eleanor Price, Rachel Kivlan Luke Mauriello Garrett Hauk
Faculty Advisor: Jennifer Harker
Department: Media & Journalism
Sports is known to bring out the competitive side of people, and offers various forms of engagement for a variety of audiences. Of these engagement methods, sports-betting has shown itself to be a popular medium for monetarily motivated team-player interaction. Sports betting is prominent among young men for both popular and less popular sports, and has the potential to increase the acclaim of growing teams and organizations. The XFL, which relaunched in 2023, has been slowly gaining traction within fan bases around the United States. The Vegas Vipers are an XFL team with a particularly high potential for sports betting opportunities. Their unique location in the city of Las Vegas combined with the city's bustling professional sports scene are unique advantages for this team. As such, this research sets out to explore the different factors that affect the betting propensity of the demographic most likely to engage in sports betting: young men ages 18-25. This social science research utilized multiple methods, both quantitative and qualitative, in order to collect this information. Individual in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and a quantitative survey were used to gather data related to a variety of constructs. Our research suggests that young men who engage in gameline or moneyline sports betting for the NFL are very unlikely to engage in sports betting for the XFL, and that comfortability within one's financial situation has little to no impact on the regularity of their betting habits. It is our professional recommendation that the XFL should integrate sports betting opportunities into its marketing materials, increase promotional efforts aimed towards increasing in-person attendance, and partner with sports betting platforms such as FanDuel and BetMGM in order to increase engagement among college-aged young men.
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