You can add up the quantity of bets quickly and not interested in playing blackjack. Let's say I like to watch the NFL on Sundays and there are 7 games I want to bet on.
7 games X 1 bet = 7 singeles bets
Now I want to parlay those bets.
1 parlay x 1 bet = 1 parlay bet
Aw shucks, I want to hedge so I'm going to do a full round robin where it's packages of all parlay combinations of two game (21x), three game (35x), four game (35x), five game (21x) and six game (7x) bets.
7 singles bets + 1 parlay bet + 119 round robin bets= 127 total bets
FYI, seven games would be less than half of a full NFL weekly slate (16 games). If you bet something marginal like 50 cents to $1 per bet, you're statistically not going to go up big or down a lot throughout the course of the season even as a broke college kid. So you keep betting every week because it's fun and you're only up/down net $10 bucks for the season.
17 weeks of the NFL regular season multiplied by 127 bets per week (see above example) = 2,159 total bets before the playoffs.
Should student athletes be betting on their own sport or their own school? No.
Should pro athletes bet on their own sport? No.
Do the pro leagues and NCAA taking that sweet, sweet legal gambling money have anyone to blame but themselves? No.