SALEM —

Hoping to see some close games and upsets, Steve Wagner will climb the stairs to row 32 today on the third level of Portland’s Rose Garden to watch four games of the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament.

What he’d really prefer to see, though, is the return of the Oregon Lottery’s betting game for professional football, Sports Action — which in turn would bring more customers to his business, the Tumalo Country Store.

“It was a fun thing to do on a Sunday morning,” said Wagner, who played the game in addition to selling tickets.

Four years ago, Oregon lawmakers ceded to pressure from the NCAA and lobbyists and voted to do away with the popular game after the 2007 football season. As part of its anti-gambling stance, the NCAA had demanded that Sports Action go away before it would consider Portland, or any other city in Oregon, to host NCAA Division I basketball tournament games.

However, a lot of Sports Action fans still miss the game, many of them in Central Oregon and Deschutes County, where the game was fairly popular. And now, as the state wrestles with a hole of 20 percent or more in its next budget, a gambling economist says Oregon might have made the wrong decision.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Robert Whelan, an economist with the Portland-based consulting firm ECONorthwest. He recently conducted a brief study of the issue to satisfy his own curiosity, and believes state coffers may be losing as much as $3.5 million per year because of the change.

“It wasn’t being abused,” he said. “It was very successful. It generated income for people.”

The Oregon Lottery started selling Sports Action tickets in 1991. It catered to football fans, some of whom otherwise might never gamble — people like John Nehl, former football coach of Mountain View High School in Bend.

“It made pro football far more interesting to watch,” he said. “It was probably a little safer than the stock market, for me.”

Sports Action players could select teams to beat a point spread set by the lottery, and, if they guessed right, receive a payout depending on how much money they paid for the ticket.

The odds were relatively good compared with some lottery games, so despite its popularity, it was not a big moneymaker. After expenses and payouts, the state earned only $2.2 million in the game’s final year, based on about $14 million in sales. The earnings went to fund college sports in Oregon. By comparison, the multistate game Powerball took in nearly $49 million in Oregon sales, leading to more than $16 million in net earnings for the state.

But due to some sports leagues’ anti-gambling positions, Sports Action was an obstacle to people trying to bring the NCAA tournament and a major-league baseball team to Portland. In 2005, backed by the Portland-based Oregon Sports Authority, the Portland Business Alliance and the Oregon Restaurant Association, Rep. Kevin Cameron, R-Salem, sponsored a bill that abolished Sports Action.

Cameron, an NCAA basketball fan who plans to attend the next round of games at the Rose Garden on Saturday, said he thinks the bill will help in ways that go beyond just the projected $10 million in increased spending for hotels, restaurants and other venues in greater Portland. He thinks the benefit for those businesses and their employees outweighs any cost to the state.

On television, “people will see pictures of the beautiful snow-capped mountains,” he said. “And it will bring tourists into our state.”

Economist Whelan, however, said the $10 million spent in greater Portland, which can happen in Oregon only once every three years, translates to an average annual benefit to the state of $86,000 in increased income taxes. He said that Sports Action produced money for the state beyond its direct earnings, including about $1.2 million in administrative funding for the lottery.

Those earnings do not include the benefit for people like Wagner, who said he earned an extra $300 or $400 in sales every Sunday morning during the NFL season, when Sports Action players bought beer and snacks.

Sports betting is illegal in most of the nation; however, four states — Oregon, Montana, Delaware and Nevada — were exempted because they had pre-existing betting laws before the federal ban was approved.

Even as Oregon has stepped back from legalized sports gambling, other states have jumped in.

In Montana, the state lottery last year set up its own version of Sports Action for football. More recently, it offered a NASCAR version, and next may do similar games for baseball and golf.

Today, Delaware Gov. Jack Markell will introduce a sports betting program that proponents say could bring in $50 million to $100 million in new state revenue. Spokesman Joe Rogalsky said the decision was prompted by a bleak economic situation — one that will sound familiar to Oregonians.

“We’re facing the biggest revenue shortfall in the state’s history, just slightly more than 20 percent of our operating budget goes away July 1,” Rogalsky said. “Beyond that … this is a unique advantage that Delaware has over neighboring states.”

Cameron said he believes that because Sports Action went away, Oregon may have lost the special exemption that allowed it to offer Sports Action.

But Oregon Lottery spokesperson Marlene Meissner is not sure of that.

“That may be something that would have to be tested (legally),” she said.

She said the lottery still gets calls regularly from fans asking them to bring the game back.

“We say you might want to call your legislator,” she said.

Rep. Gene Whisnant, R-Sunriver, voted to support Cameron’s bill in 2005. An avid NCAA fan, he said he hopes Whelan is wrong, but “I would not be opposed to reconsidering (the fate of Sports Action) after the tournament.”