When the Supreme Court cleared the way for legal sports gambling in 2018, the NFL rushed to embrace a lucrative line of business that it had criticized for decades as bad for the sport. There is, after all, new money to be made. The results of that face part are coming soon.
The league on Friday handed down some of the toughest penalties ever issued, banning three players through at least the 2023 season for betting on NFL games and suspending two others for six games for other violations of the league’s betting policy. The scale of the latest scandal and the brief ruling from the league have raised questions about the dangerous line the NFL tries to walk in gambling.
The indefinite suspensions of three players — receiver Quintez Cephus and safety CJ Moore of the Detroit Lions and defensive end Shaka Toney of the Washington Commanders — mean five players out of the past four years received at least a one-time ban for betting on NFL games, after decades without such penalties. The investigation this week ended with two other Lions players, receivers Stanley Berryhill and Jameson Williams, suspended for six games for lesser gambling violations that did not include betting on games in the NFL.
This type of scandal may be what the NFL has been watching for in the 25 years it has spent inveighing against legal sports betting. “We shouldn’t gamble with our children’s heroes,” Paul Tagliabue, the league’s commissioner, testified in Congress in 1991 in support of legislation that effectively banned sports betting nationwide. In 2012, it was Roger Goodell’s turn to discuss the cause.
“The NFL will not be liable for damages for the damage sports gambling has caused to the goodwill, character and integrity of NFL football,” Goodell wrote in a declaration for the sports betting lawsuit.
Yet in 2018, when the Supreme Court overturned the law sponsored by Tagliabue, paving the way for states to legalize sports betting, the NFL quickly got back on course and sought to make a profit. Once a critic of everything Las Vegas stands for, the league in short order allows the Raiders to build a stadium off the Strip with a view of Luxor’s pyramid, host of the Pro Bowl. and the city’s draft, and will end the 2023 season with a Super Bowl there.
In the process, the league opened the door to the damage its leaders have spent a quarter century warning against.
“Today, young athletes are coming to professional sports leagues with mixed messages, not only from society and gambling companies, but from the sports leagues themselves,” said Marc Edelman. , a law professor and director of sports ethics at Baruch College. As long as the NFL has partnerships with betting companies, advertises betting during its games and encourages betting to the point of having sportsbooks on site at NFL stadiums, there is a “degree of identify dissonance for some players,” which may not be perfect. realize the consequences when they bet on sports, Edelman added.
The NFL, which says it educates all personnel annually about its gambling policies, has justified its tough penalties as necessary to protect the “integrity of the game.” Yet the NFL has not disclosed enough information about the violations to let the public know whether players bet on their teams’ games, or bet in coordination with each other, or how they were caught. There was no explanation from the league as to whether, or how, the integrity of that game or any other was at risk.
The severity of the discipline, such as that imposed against players who had previously bet on their own teams, seemed to be aimed at deterring others. But the league’s explanation of its sanctions falls short of another goal: ensuring public trust.
In a 181-word statement, issued over the weekend, the league asked fans to consider the value of a statement that “a league review found no evidence that indicates that any content information has been used or that any game has been compromised in any way.”
But the league has a track record of not being forthcoming about damaging information. The NFL destroyed videotapes and other evidence it collected as part of the 2007 Spygate investigation, which showed the New England Patriots filmed their opponents on the sideline to steal a signal. And it refused to compel the release of a written report detailing the findings of a league-sponsored investigation into allegations of workplace abuse and harassment under Daniel Snyder’s leadership of the Commanders.
Although sports betting has been widely legal in the United States for just a few years, today’s players are effectively raised on gambling as entertainment. Sports betting apps borrow from the micro-transactions and loot boxes prevalent in video games, and many are created by the same companies that once filled the NFL airwaves with ads for daily fantasy. games.
“The ease with which people can bet on games on their phone is a boon to the sports gambling industry, because it puts a casino at everyone’s fingertips,” Edelman said. “But it’s very easy for someone to make a quick decision to place a bet of a small amount without thinking twice about it, and only find out later that it’s a violation.”
Many sports betting experts argue that catching players who bet is evidence that the system works. With sports leagues, betting data companies and law enforcement aligned, their monitoring, they said, is more effective in rooting out illegal activities now that betting is legal.
The partnerships the NFL makes with sports betting companies are estimated to be worth hundreds of millions each year. Instead of the “damages” Goodell warned of in 2012, the NFL reaped the spoils, including huge sponsorship deals with casinos — while some players paid a steep price as the league announced his integrity.
Arizona Cardinals defensive back Josh Shaw, who was suspended in 2019 for more than one season for betting on NFL games, has not played in the NFL again. Former Atlanta Falcons receiver Calvin Ridley, a former first-round pick, was traded to the Jacksonville Jaguars during his season-long suspension and reinstated in March. The Lions immediately cut Cephus and Moore on Friday.
Bob Boland, a Seton Hall sports law professor who teaches topics including gambling law, described the influx of new gambling money into the NFL as having a “steroidal effect” that hastened the departure of league in its view of gambling as an existential threat.
“Maybe that will go away in time,” Boland said. “But it certainly sends a message that we don’t treat it with the same level of fear and dread that we did before, so maybe you shouldn’t worry about it either.”
Finding a palatable way to embrace something that has long been viewed as a vice, Boland adds, “is a difficult challenge,” especially when change is happening so quickly.
Goodell was right in 2012 that there was a cost to legalizing sports betting. But the NFL continues to hope it won’t pay for it.