Tournament Brackets Aren't Child-Grooming

Curmie apologizes if he gave the impression in his last post that all stupid personnel decisions related to K-12 education are perpetrated by school boards. They aren’t, of course. There are plenty of moronic principals out there, and even more (in raw numbers, although not in percentages) really stupid teachers. 

This case, though, is stranger than most, as the person being sacked wasn’t a school employee at all. 

Taylor Mathis: NOT a child-groomer

To explain… Taylor Mathis was in Illinois to attend her sister’s baby shower. The sister teaches second grade, and asked Taylor to drop by her class to help her with a math lesson, using sports as an access point. Taylor, at the time an employee of SuperBook (that’s the sports betting outfit, not the CBN affiliate, although you might not be able to guess that from what ensued), agreed to help. She does most of her work on baseball, so the original plan was to talk to the kids about baseball scorecards. 

It’s March, though, and the top sports story in the country was/is (no offense, World Baseball Classic) the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. So Mathis decided to show the second-graders how to fill out a bracket. They went around the room and talked about what the seeding numbers mean. And then they picked teams. That was it. No discussion of gambling whatsoever: just a fun way to sneak a little math into the day’s activities. It’s not a terribly original idea; one suspects that hundreds of elementary school teachers have been doing the same thing for years. 

And that’s sort of the point. No, not everyone fills out a bracket, but millions of people do, and a lot of those folks are kids. OutKick’s Dan Zaksheske says he was filling out brackets at about that age and that helping his father grade bracket pools taught him “a TON of math.” That probably came from dealing with the increasing values for games in the various rounds of play—probably a little heady for 2nd graders, but at least tangentially relevant to the situation at hand. 

Right. So. The Big Mistake Mathis made was that she took a photo of the bracket the kids had created and posted it on social media, where there was, well, lots of support and no dissent. Ah, but some gaggle of gambling reformers pronounced Mathis’s activity “child grooming” and whined to the bosses at SuperBook, who proceeded to panic. 

First, they contacted Mathis and demanded she take down the tweet and apologize. She’d done nothing wrong, of course, but she complied, “through tears.” But—and Curmie can’t emphasize this enough—in a situation like this one, apologizing when you’ve done nothing wrong is The Worst Possible Thing You Can Do. It’s never enough, and once the self-righteous meddlers smell blood in the water, you’re done. 

And so it was that Mathis was fired, as SuperBook invoked their company’s “steadfast commitment to Responsible Gambling and protecting youth.” They even demanded (probably illegally—time to break out the “Curmie isn’t a lawyer” trope) that she delete everything about her relationship with SuperBook and that she not be in contact with anyone at the company “until further notice.” If the ability to demand that isn’t in her contract, well, Curmie isn’t a lawyer, but…. 

Gentle Reader, do not even attempt to read that crap without laughing at SuperBook; you’ll only hurt yourself. SuperBook, like so many other corporations, is run by sanctimonious and spineless idiots who really have no value system at all. Otherwise, they’d have told the whiners to get a goddamned life and STFU. Of course, expecting anything in the same universe as ethical values from a sportsbook company is probably asking a bit much. 

But acquiescing to charges of “child grooming”? Bloody hell. Curmie realizes the term no longer has a specific definition since it was taken over as the scurrilous accusation of choice by a gaggle of self-righteous homophobes, but come on… A more innocent day in a 2nd grade classroom would be difficult to imagine. 

Jeff Edelstein of SportsHandle claims Mathis was “sacrificed at the altar of responsible gambling.” Curmie disagrees, at least to the extent of those lower-case letters. Responsible Gambling (note the capitalization in the message from corporate), a brand name as opposed to an actual theory or a concept, maybe. But Mathis lost her job for the sole reason that the bosses at SuperBook have both the brains and the backbone of overcooked linguini. (To be fair to Edelstein, elsewhere in his article he refers to “capital-R, capital-G Responsible Gambling.” We’re on the same page.) 

If this decision has the slightest bit to do with the political attacks on sports betting in general, it’s an even greater demonstration of the company’s lack of integrity. Sure, if Mathis had been fired for a legitimate reason—if she really had been promoting the joys of gambling to seven-year-olds, for example—then perhaps SuperBook’s willingness to clean house might be seen as a positive by someone somewhere, even by legislators who seek to restrict the industry in general. But “we fired a valuable and completely innocent employee in an exercise of utterly unethical virtue signaling” does little to warm the cockles of Curmie’s sub-Arctic heart, and he suspects that not too many pols are lining up in support, either. 

Mathis, though shaken up, will be fine. She’s apparently good at her job, and she’s already signed on at SportsGrid, a SuperBook competitor. Curmie has never placed a bet with any such agency, and he has no intention of starting now. But should he change his mind, he’s a lot more likely to go with SportsGrid. 

Curmie agrees with Zaksheske that “March Madness brackets are not a gateway drug to hardcore gambling addiction.” He’d add that doing business with SportsBook is a gateway drug to self-righteous and hypocritical bullshit.