Will Alabama Get To Decide Its Betting Future?

The Pride of Alabama — the Rolling Tide football team — had a good, but not great, football season. Sure, they made the College Football Playoff, but they were clobbered in it (after being demolished in the SEC Championship the game before).

If it wasn’t obvious by now, the days of being perennial championship favorites like they were for over a decade with Nick Saban, yeah, that’s gone. The top betting apps have Bama as +1500 favorites for the national title next year. Good, but still miles behind the likes of Texas or Ohio State.

For the first time in maybe ever, people in Alabama can now put money on this championship outcome — and without breaking the law. That’s because prediction markets rushed the state and country in 2025. You can buy “contracts” on the site, pertaining to whether Alabama will win the title or not. Again, all legal.

All the while Alabama sports betting — the non-prediction market kind — is still banned. With this ban, the state has effectively cut off any way to monetize the act of gambling, despite it still happening on prediction markets and popular offshore sportsbooks.

So what gives? That’s what one Alabama resident is asking in an op-ed she wrote AL — a leading news source of the state. It was such a good and impassioned read that we had to write about it here. Keep reading for a non-nonsense look at the betting landscape inside the state.

The Smart Argument Against Prediction Markets

For starters, the op-ed was written by a girl, not a guy as you’d probably expect on such an issue. Donna Granberry is the writer, and serves as the President of Republican Women of East Alabama.

She starts off by saying sports betting is and has been a state rights issue. Back in 2018, the Supreme Court decided so, lifting the federal ban. This kicked the decision whether to have legal sports betting or not to the state. So far, 39 states have moved forward and legalized it. There are 11 still holding out, including Alabama.

We could write an entire article about why Alabama hasn’t legalized by now, but long story short: it’s a very conservative state. They also don’t have a state lottery — one of the few states without so. Bills have been floated before to legalize sports betting, but none ever got real close to passing. Lawmakers and voters just haven’t shown a large appetite to do so.

This op-ed mentions this, but also calls out prediction markets. They are federally legal right now — though many states are fighting to change that (no luck yet). Because of that, it’s available across the country, even in states like Alabama that don’t allow regular sports betting. Prediction markets are being treated like stock futures, thus bypassing state laws.

Donna doesn’t like that. True to her southern ways, she’s for state rights. Not federal regulators in New York that are allowing this. Betting might be a minuscule issue to state rights, but what’s the saying? “Give the devil an inch, and he’ll go a mile?” Well, Donna says this could open the door for more of this. Here’s the money quote:

“Allowing federal agencies to override state authority on gambling sets a dangerous precedent. Today it’s betting. Tomorrow, it could be other areas traditionally left to the states.”

The article ends by saying that Alabama lawmakers should decide whether to allow betting, and only them. Not federal agencies. She never says Alabama should or shouldn’t legalize it — only they should have the right to decide for themselves. And honestly, we tend to agree with her point of view.

Sportsbooks Are Taking Advantage of Federal Rules

Originally, we had two prediction markets duking it for supremacy — Polymarket and Kalshi. There were a few other names, but the market was almost entirely cornered by those two entities.

But in the last few months, we’ve seen a flood of new platforms launch including DraftKings Predictions, FanDuel Predicts, and Fanatics Markets. That’s right, the leading sportsbook apps are now in the market — each launching siloed platforms for predictions in the past two months.

These platforms are not available everywhere. Some hostile states have threatened to revoke the bookie’s sports betting rights in the state if they launched predictions there too — which some obliged and skipped out on. But know which state has access to all of them? Alabama.

Whereas states that regulated sports betting already had some leverage, Alabama and other non-legal states have none. Literally none. As much as Donna would like, they’re not in a position to penalize these markets. Hence why her op-ed was so passionate perhaps.

To us, this feels like a huge mess. Alabama is trying to stick to its guns, but it’s hard to when technology makes it this easy to put money on a sports outcome — laws be damned. At what point do they throw in the tell, legalize the thing, and shape the industry like they want? We think that makes too much sense.