Utah should be unusually well equipped to resist the sports-betting boom: gambling is illegal, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has long condemned it. After visiting Brigham Young University, Weber State, Utah State and the University of Utah, McKay Coppins reports that those barriers still matter—but cannot fully insulate the state from a national betting culture.

There is evidence of protection in his September 22 essay. Many students said sports betting rarely came up among friends. Campus mental-health counselors described seeing less problem gambling than at universities where they had previously worked outside Utah. This is reporting from conversations, not a prevalence study; it does not establish how many Utah students gamble or how quickly participation is changing.

Access is one breach; normalization is another

Coppins identifies two ways the barriers are weakening:

  • Students who want to bet find routes around the ban. Some place bets while visiting other states or cross state lines on weekends. Others use prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket, which he reports have operated in Utah despite its prohibition. He notes that a recent court ruling could threaten their position; the essay is not a definitive account of their current legal status.
  • Some no longer classify the activity as gambling. Many Latter-day Saint men he spoke with treated sports betting as ordinary sports fandom, and prediction markets as something outside the old moral prohibition. Coppins sees this as a marketing success: the behavior survives because its label has changed.

He also suggests that relatively quiet recent messaging from Church leaders may help explain the shift. The historical contrast is striking: Dallin H. Oaks devoted his first campus-wide devotional as BYU president in 1971 to gambling, especially state lotteries. Coppins is asking why a once-explicit warning has become less prominent as betting has become easier to access.

The business incentives run the other way

Against that weakening stigma, Coppins cites the New York Times investigation into DraftKings: the company developed an AI model to identify customers likely to lose money and target them with promotions, while sidelining a model designed to flag potential compulsive behavior. That reporting is covered separately in the feed’s DraftKings summary.

His central point is narrower than saying Utah’s protections have failed. They appear to reduce exposure, but a state boundary cannot block a national marketing campaign—or preserve a taboo when the product is successfully presented as something the taboo does not cover.