What are the odds?

Flattening the curve is good when it comes to COVID-19, but bad with regard to the sports-betting handle in New Jersey. But as the four major sports leagues – the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association –all struggle to salvage their seasons in the midst of a global pandemic, the wagering curve may very well remain flat.

“That they will actually be able to continue playing games is not a given,” explained Sarah Grady, assistant director of Stockton University’s Lloyd D. Levenson Institute of Gaming, Hospitality and Tourism.

In the realm of professional baseball, a COVID-19 outbreak among several members of the Miami Marlins forced the team to postpone several of its games. “Guys were around each other, they got relaxed and they let their guard down,” the team’s chief executive officer, Derek Jeter, said in a recent ESPN interview. “They were getting together in groups. They weren’t wearing masks as much as they should have; they weren’t social distancing.”

Gambling on sports is, by its very nature, based on uncertainty. But the possibility an outbreak could cause contests to be cancelled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in wagers pending, or a star player might become infected and get pulled from the front lines, adds a new level of risk for bettors and the industry.

“If a bookmaker is going to take a $10,000 bet on the [Los Angeles] Lakers, they may only take a $5,000 bet, depending on their threshold for exposure and what their appetite for risk is,” said Max Bichsel, vice president of the Gambling.com Group.

The NFL season, scheduled to open in a matter of weeks, remains up in the air, amid reports of outbreaks within college and professional teams that hadn’t even been competing.

A COVID-19 outbreak among the Rutgers Scarlet Knights and subsequent quarantine of the entire team has thrown the program’s fall plans into uncertainty – though recent news reports have traced those outbreaks to a house party.

While our strategy is to continue planning for all fall sports, if the virus continues to spread
among our students despite our many preventative measures, including testing and quarantine protocols, we are also prepared to delay or cancel competition pursuant to local and state public health orders or the recommendations of our medical experts.

— Aug. 5 statement from Big Ten officials

State law prohibits wagers from being placed in New Jersey on any Garden State-based teams, but the 50,000-student university is one of 14 members in the Big Ten Conference. The league includes football giants like Penn State and Ohio State. And the Big Ten is among the Power Five conferences, which include the nation’s most significant college football teams.

Of the five members, the Big Ten, Southeastern Conference and Pac 12 have said they would allow in-conference games only. At the NFL level, many players have taken to social media to opine that team leadership hasn’t been doing enough to protect their health.

Big Ten officials conceded in an Aug. 5 statement that even though they had a 2020 fall football schedule, “issuing a schedule does not guarantee that competition would occur.”

“While our strategy is to continue planning for all fall sports, if the virus continues to spread among our students despite our many preventative measures, including testing and quarantine protocols, we are also prepared to delay or cancel competition pursuant to local and state public health orders or the recommendations of our medical experts,” the statement reads.

Baseball, which started in late July, entails a variety of mitigation protocols and they have worked so far, according to Dustin Gouker, an analyst for PlayNJ.com, an online publication covering the state’s gaming industry.

“Baseball players are tested every day. Once someone tests positive … there’ll be contact tracing. The player who’s tested positive will be quarantined,” Gouker said.

But football accounts for the lion’s share of sports bets. Of the $1.2 billion wagered at New Jersey’s sportsbooks in 2018, over $500 million – or 40 percent – was bet on football. And in 2019, of the $4.5 billion of wagers, $939 million – about a quarter – were placed on football. Another quarter of those bets, $934 million, was placed on basketball.

DraftKings, one of the nation’s biggest online sportsbooks, adopted a set of policies on how to handle bets on games given the uncertainty with COVID-19, citing a “fluid” situation in which the pandemic has “impacted the schedules for major sports leagues worldwide.”

The policy addresses such eventualities as a team postponing its play for the season, the cancellation of individual games and the cancellation of entire league schedule. “It really is an hour by hour, day by day approach,” Bichsel said.

But Grady said that the pent-up demand for sports-wagering might be enough to counteract the uncertainty over how the current sports seasons and fall football will play out. Casinos after all, hadn’t opened until around the July Fourth weekend, after staying closed since March 16.

“Early in the pandemic, when U.S. sports were put on hold, some sports bettors still bet on whatever was available like table tennis, and soccer that resumed in other countries,” she explained. “Presumably some bettors will shift to whatever sports are available whether or not it is their favorite.”

The total number of wagers placed collapsed in March, before reaching its low point in April, with seasons postponed and in-person sportsbooks closed to the public. In March, patrons wagered nearly $190 million – most of it online – compared to $372 million in March 2019. Meanwhile in April, patrons wagered $55 million, all of it online, compared to $314 million in April 2019.

Online gambling in New Jersey set records for several consecutive months before the pandemic, providing a boost to struggling Atlantic City casinos. The sportsbooks have begun a slow recovery, with May and then June apparently showing promising results.

Gaming regulators are scheduled to release the numbers on Aug. 12 for how the casinos and sportsbooks fared in July – the first month that brick and mortar establishments were allowed to reopen at reduced capacity.

“Pent up demand, for gambling in general” and “the fact that sports are back, before you didn’t really have much to bet on,” all worked in the sportsbook’s favor, Gouker said.