Now that sports gambling is legal in most states, it has become a huge part of sports television (to the delight of some and dismay of many others). No longer do sports commentators have to make winking references to the spread or total, hoping the general public is unaware, and instead can talk freely about gambling if they so choose.
On ESPN’s First Take, Chris “Mad Dog” Russo has gotten real loose talking about his gambling, once nearly doxxing his bookie — Fat Rob — on air while laying out his weekend plans to pop a gummie and put 10 dimes on Colorado. On Wednesday, Mad Dog joined the program to vent about losing a big parlay after the Jaguars and Texans failed to go over the total of 48.5, listing off all of the missed scoring opportunities as any jilted gambler would.
However, after getting that off of his chest, Stephen A. Smith couldn’t help but ask him the question every friend of a degenerate wants to ask, but is usually too afraid to: “How much have you lost this season?” Mad Dog then let the panel of Stephen A., Molly Qerim, and Marcus Spears guess, and said it was somewhere in between Molly’s guess of $50,000 and Marcus’ guess of $100,000 — but not as high as SAS’s $150,000 guess.
.@MadDogUnleashed says on @FirstTake that he’s lost between $50,000 and $100,000 gambling.
Eliminating some of these parlays probably would help his bottom linehttps://t.co/xBIF5iw4iZ
— Ben Fawkes (@BFawkes22) November 29, 2023
Given Mad Dog said he planned on betting $10,000 on Colorado against Oregon (who beat them by a million and covered easily) and he is apparently throwing together five-leg parlays regularly, I’m honestly a little surprised the loss figure isn’t more than this. He does not seem like he is a particularly good gambler and also seems to be heaving some large figures on games, so being in the $75,000 down range honestly is better than I expected. Still, that’s a lot of money to lose in a less than a season of football betting (with a lot of weeks left in the NFL) and hopefully folks haven’t been tailing Mad Dog’s picks this year if he’s handing any out on his radio show. On the other hand, Fat Rob’s family can probably thank Mad Dog for the nice gifts this holiday season.
