Since the Supreme Court widely legalized sports wagering in 2018, the nation's appetite for bets has exploded.

U.S. betters made over a billion dollars worth of bets in 2025 on sports bets alone.

This year's Super Bowl is expected to attract $1.7 billion in legal U.S. wagers, but

investigators are finding that there's also been a surge in illegal betting by minors. Are

sports books putting our children in harm's way? Hello and welcome to USA Today is The Excert. I'm

Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, February 4, 2026.

Marketing for top sports books like Draft Kings and Fandul floods the airwaves and casts a giant net for customers.

Critics say has lured-in high schoolers and younger college students alongside those legally allowed to bet.

How can the sports books industry fix the problem?

Here to help me dig into all of it is USA Today,

investigative reporter Nick Pins and Stodler.

Nick, thank you so much for coming on the excerpt.

Of course.

I want to start with getting a broad sense from you

of how big the sports books industry is

and how much of that is illegal betting by minors.

Yeah, this is a really big industry and it's split into a few different sectors.

So just looking at legal sports betting in the United States, it's $156 billion bet in a year. So that's a huge amount of money.

Put one way, that's more than Americans spend on almost any other form of entertainment,

whether it's sports tickets, books, concerts combined. So it's a huge amount of money,

and that equates to about $15 billion in revenue for these regulated markets.

And again, that's just in the backdrop of the entire slice of the pie of in casino gambling,

...