Statistician Ron Yurko says he spent his doctoral program largely siloed off from the outside world, his attention trained on his studies and crafting a 150-page dissertation.
Still, even Yurko couldn’t ignore the explosion of sports betting after its legalization in 2018, as gamblers who’d heard about his work on sports analytics flooded him with requests for advice.
At the time, he shelved these inquiries. But after he started working as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he realized that the sports betting craze had also swept onto college campuses, becoming widespread among his students.
“They’re doing it right in the classroom, even,” he said.
Now, he’s teaming up with a colleague, neuroscience professor Linda Moya, to offer an undergraduate course on sports betting awareness and safety. Yurko’s portion of the class will cover the statistics that underpin sports wagering, while Moya will teach students about the dynamics of decision making.
Yurko said he’s not aware of any similar courses being offered at other universities and thinks his class could be the first of its kind.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court paved the way for sports betting’s legalization several years ago, it has ballooned as an industry — generating nearly $14 billion in revenue in the U.S. last year — and transformed the way people watch and think about athletics.
Online and sports gaming has proliferated among adults and college students alike, with a 2023 National Collegiate Athletic Association survey finding that about two-thirds of students living on campus were bettors.
If it were up to him, Yurko said, he’d encourage students to stop wagering on athletics altogether. Knowing that probably won’t happen, his aim through the course is to educate them about the odds stacked against them and the risks of compulsive gambling.
Because sportsbooks exclude skilled bettors who have a track record of winning, the very fact that someone can maintain access to the platforms means the person is losing money, Yurko said.
“If you’ve had an account for a long time, you should delete it,” he said. “You are officially bad at this.”
Though most sports bettors are losing money, people who have already slipped into addictive gambling can struggle to break away — another dynamic the course will seek to explore.
Moya’s part of the class will help students understand how their brains form positive or negative habits and how these patterns of behavior can influence their choices.
“The goal is that by the end of the course, students will know generally how the healthy brain makes decisions and how the addicted brain can lead to making bad decisions,” she told the USA TODAY Network in an email.
Yurko said he also hopes to teach students how much labor goes into successful sports gambling, which isn’t the easy moneymaker that some people picture it being.
Even with his background in sports analytics and statistics, Yurko doesn’t place bets on athletics, given the time and effort he’d have to devote to it if he wants to make money. He’d prefer to invest those hours in academic research instead, he said.
In meetings with students interested in sports betting as a college side hustle, Yurko said he’s encouraged them to adopt a similar mindset.
“I tell them, how about you take up a teaching assistant job or try to work in a lab?” he said. “I would recommend you work at Starbucks instead of doing this.”
Students at Carnegie Mellon, a prestigious private school with a highly ranked statistics program, can feel they have the know-how and savvy to go up against the platforms, Yurko said. What they don’t consider, he continued, is that they’re trying to beat graduates with the exact same skill set who are working against them at DraftKings or FanDuel.
Sports betting platforms have various ways of tilting the odds in their favor, he said, such as by offering parlays, or wagers with multiple components that a gambler has to predict correctly in order to win.
Along those lines, Yurko is mulling the idea of creating a fake sportsbook specifically for the course to help students understand how gambling companies maintain the upper hand. Like the real-world platforms, Yurko said he’d limit the betting opportunities for students who are too good at it.
He said the spring 2026 course, which has space for about 35 students, is already full and has a waitlist.
While he knows many are drawn in by the sports betting subject matter, the course will function as a kind of “Trojan horse,” providing a perfect opportunity to teach statistics concepts and raise awareness about gambling addiction.
“If I could just make them a little bit smarter about what they’re doing and then prevent them from losing as much money,” he said, “then I view that as a win.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with gambling, call or text 1-800-GAMBLER, operated by the Council on Compulsive Gambling of Pennsylvania.
Bethany Rodgers is a USA TODAY Network Pennsylvania investigative journalist.
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As sports betting sweeps campuses, two Pa. professors will teach students gambling safety – Erie Times-News
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