As the Seattle Seahawks players showered head coach Mike Macdonald in Gatorade, fans began celebrating the newest Super Bowl champs and while confetti flew down onto the field in Santa Clara, I heard an unexpected cry from the Tulane University crowd gathered in Prytania Theater to watch Super Bowl 60: “Show us Wahlberg!”

Huh? Is there a special teams player named Wahlberg? The Seahawks won their first championship since 2014; who cares about award-winning actor Mark Wahlberg during the Super Bowl?

This group of Tulane students did — they all had money riding on whether Wahlberg would be among the people in attendance. In this age, you can bet on more than the game. You can bet on pretty much anything.

If gambling on sports is as old as sports, then so, too, are its scandals. From the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal to Ippei Mizuhara, MLB interpreter of Shohei Ohtani’s, who gambled millions of dollars. Sportsbooks and fixed matches have altered the games we collectively love. 

Until 2018, there was no legalized sports gambling anywhere in the United States, except in Nevada. Following the landmark ruling in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association in 2018, wagering on games became a legitimate business. 

Today, DraftKings and FanDuel offer digital betting in 26 and 23 states, respectively, which has revolutionized the betting landscape. The NBA’s and NFL’s ongoing partnerships with these sportsbooks make it seem like a rite of passage to start gambling at 21 years old. The birth of online sportsbooks has decreased the average gambling age, but their successor, Kalshi, presents an infinitely larger concern for an age group that is fresh off puberty.

Kalshi marketplace allows users aged 18 and older to bet on millions of outcomes, from political discourse to stock options to sports and culture. The online platform gained incredible traction in late 2024 when it achieved the right to offer political outcomes as trades. Events like the presidential election, the Grammy Awards and the Super Bowl often draw large volumes of activity, but Kalshi’s coverage of every single sporting event with live trading options has led students to venture away from traditional sportsbook betting. 

With an extensive portfolio and a three-year head start on every sports-betting site, Kalshi has inevitably hooked a new generation on gambling and achieved this feat much earlier than its predecessors.

Back at Prytania Theater, I spoke to a Tulane sophomore who said he was banking on actor Mark Wahlberg to be present at the Super Bowl through Kalshi. He explained Walberg’s daughter had apparently accidentally revealed he would be there. 

The thought process of these students is difficult to deny. Why take the risk of betting the spread when you can take advantage of liabilities on Kalshi? Unfortunately, the young trading platform carries some massive interpretation risks. Even if Wahlberg attended the game, if he did not appear on the television broadcast or in any major media report as present, the “Yes” outcome in the market would drop to a mere two percent. 

From my seat, I overheard another group of students hoping not to see Jeff Bezos on the broadcast, as a mutual friend with ties to the Bezos family had confirmed this absence. 

Like all regulated financial markets in the U.S., such as stocks, bonds or commodities, Kalshi is governed by rules prohibiting the use of “insider information” for personal gain. 

Examining the chaos after the game, I was shocked to see one fan in a Seahawks jersey imploring the big screen to pan to Wahlberg instead of jumping for joy that his team had been crowned champions. This image, which would have been unfathomable to any loyal fan a decade ago, represents the new, distorted reality of sports viewership for young men: a game whose highlights are less important than the pop culture surrounding it and a fandom compromised by financial opportunity, unrelated to the sport itself. 

The insatiable appetite for “betting on everything” raises a number of concerns: Is this a good thing, or has it already gone too far? The impacts of Kalshi may go hand in hand with the coordinates of your sports moral compass.