NFL walks a thin line on player betting

When the Supreme Court cleared the way for legalized sports gambling in 2018, the NFL raced to embrace a lucrative industry that had been condemned for decades as bad for sports. After all, there was new money to be made. The consequences of that turnaround are now beginning to emerge.

The league handed out some of the harshest penalties it has ever issued on Friday, with three players suspended for at least the 2023 season for betting on NFL games and two others suspended for six games for other violations of the league’s betting policies. . The scale of the latest scandal and the league’s succinct ruling raise questions about the precarious line the NFL is trying to take with gambling.

The indefinite suspension of three players — receiver Quintez Cephus and safety CJ Moore of the Detroit Lions and defensive end Shaka Toney of the Washington Commanders — means five players have been suspended for at least a season for NFL betting in the past four years competitions, after decades without such punishments. This week’s investigation ended with two more Lions players, receivers Stanley Berryhill and Jameson Williams, suspended for six games for minor gambling violations, including betting on NFL games.

Scandals like this may have been what the NFL has been wary of during the 25 years it spent fighting legalized sports betting. “We shouldn’t gamble with our children’s heroes,” Paul Tagliabue, then league commissioner, testified before Congress in 1991 in support of legislation banning sports betting nationwide. In 2012 it was Roger Goodell’s turn to take on the case.

“The NFL cannot recover damages for the harm that sports betting causes to the goodwill, character and integrity of NFL football,” Goodell wrote in a statement to a sports betting lawsuit.

But in 2018, when the Supreme Court overturned the law Tagliabue had defended and cleared the way for states to legalize sports betting, the NFL quickly reversed course and tried to turn a profit. Once a critic of everything Las Vegas stood for, the league quickly allowed the Raiders to build a stadium just off the Strip overlooking the Luxor Pyramid, hold the Pro Bowl and draft in the city, and will finish the 2023 season with a Super Bowl there.

In the process, the league swung open the door to the evils its leaders warned against for a quarter of a century.

“Now the young athletes in professional sports leagues are coming in with mixed messages, not just from society and gambling companies, but from the sports leagues themselves,” said Marc Edelman, a professor of law 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 on-site sports betting in NFL stadiums, there will be “a level of cognitive dissonance for some players,” which may not be entirely realize the consequences of betting on sports, Edelman added.

The NFL, which says it annually informs all staff about its gambling policies, has justified the harsh penalties as necessary to protect the “integrity of the game”. Still, the NFL hasn’t released enough information about the violations for the public to know if the players bet on their teams’ games, or bet in coordination with each other, or how they got caught. There is no clarity from the league as to whether or how the integrity of that game or others was compromised.

The severity of the discipline, similar to that of players who have previously bet on their own teams, seemed aimed at scaring others. But the league’s explanation of the penalties failed to serve another purpose: to ensure the public’s confidence.

In a 181-word statement released on the eve of the weekend, the league asked fans to mock the one-sentence claim that “a league review revealed no evidence that any inside information had been used or that a game was compromised in Anyway.”

But the league has a track record of not being upfront about harmful information. The NFL destroyed the videotapes and other evidence it collected as part of the 2007 Spygate investigation, which revealed that the New England Patriots filmed their opponents’ sidelines to steal signals. And it declined to compel and release a written report detailing the findings of the league-sponsored investigation into allegations of workplace abuse and harassment led by Commanders Daniel Snyder.

Although sports betting has only been widely legal in the United States for a few years, today’s players have basically been raised on gambling as entertainment. Sports betting apps borrow from the microtransactions and loot boxes prevalent in video games, many created by the same companies that once drenched the NFL’s airwaves with ads for everyday fantasy sports.

“The ease with which people can bet on sports on their phones is a boon to the sports betting industry as it puts a casino within everyone’s hands,” said Edelman. “But it’s much easier for someone to make an immediate decision to place a single bet of a small amount without thinking twice, only to realize afterwards that this is a violation.”

Many sports betting experts claim that capturing bets from players is proof that the system works. Now that sports leagues, gambling data companies and law enforcement are aligned, their oversight, they say, is more effective in rooting out illegal activity now that betting is legal.

The partnerships the NFL has formed with sports betting companies are estimated to be in the hundreds of millions each year. Instead of the “damage” Goodell warned of in 2012, the NFL has reaped loot, including huge sponsorship deals with casinos – while a handful of players have paid a high price as the league proclaims its integrity.

Arizona Cardinals defenseman Josh Shaw, who was suspended for more than a season in 2019 for betting on NFL games, never 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 was reinstated in March. The Lions promptly cut Cephus and Moore on Friday.

Bob Boland, a sports law professor at Seton Hall who teaches topics including gambling law, described the influx of new gambling money into the NFL as a “steroidal effect” that accelerated the league to abandon its view of gambling as an existential threat .

“That will probably go away with time,” Boland said. “But it certainly sent a signal that we’re no longer treating this with the amount of fear and anxiety we used to, so maybe you shouldn’t worry about it either.”

Finding a savory way to embrace something long considered a vice, Boland added, “is a difficult challenge,” especially when the change happened so quickly.

Goodell was right in 2012 that there would be costs associated with legalizing sports betting. But the NFL remains hopeful that it won’t be the one to pay it.