The floodgates for legalized sports betting opened more than seven years ago. Both baseball and basketball have endured scandals regarding prop bets. For now, the NFL’s problems (that we know about) have been confined to players betting when they shouldn’t or, in the case of Calvin Ridley, making a parlay wager including his team at a time when he wasn’t with his team.
In the NBA, Jontay Porter received a lifetime ban last year for manipulating his playing time so that the unders on his prop bets would win. His brother, Nets forward Michael Porter, Jr., believes that players will continue to yield to the temptation to manipulate their stats.
If only to help their friends make a little easy money.
“Think about it, if you could get all your homies rich by telling them, ‘Yo, bet $10,000 on my under this one game. I’m going to act like I’ve got an injury, and I’m going sit out. I’m going to come out after three minutes,’” Michael Porter Jr. said on the One Night with Steiny podcast, via David Purdum of ESPN.com. “And they all get a little bag because you did it one game.”
Michael Porter Jr. doesn’t condone it. He nevertheless understands how and why it will happen.
“That is so not OK, but some people probably think like that,” Michael Porter Jr. said. “They come from nothing, and all their homies have nothing.”
It becomes easier for players to justify it when they see how much money is being made from gambling, especially by their employers.
“The enjoyment of the game isn’t for the game anymore,” Michael Porter Jr. said. “It’s so that people can make money. In reality, way more people are losing money than making money. . . . The whole sports gambling entity . . . it’s bad and it’s only going to get worse.”
Inside information is prevalent in all sports, including football. Many people know things the public doesn’t. Who’s really injured? What’s the game plan for the week? Who will, or won’t, be featured in the offensive attack?
As one head coach explained it to PFT a couple of years ago, the teams that script the first 15 plays of the game will necessarily have that script in the building, somewhere. Who has access to it? What if it’s written on a whiteboard in a meeting room and someone (like the person who empties the trash cans) wanders into the room and sees it?
Two years ago, Falcons running back Bijan Robinson had an undisclosed illness that dramatically limited his playing time. Who knew about that before the game? And how hard would it have been for someone who had that information to call someone else and says, “Bet Bijan’s unders today.”
Although the Falcons were eventually fined for not disclosing Robinson’s illness, there was never a word said about whether anyone may have misused that information — or whether that wrinkle was even investigated.
So, what’s the league doing to ensure that inside information is protected? What’s the league doing to ensure that it’s not being misused?
It’s a real concern, one that could undermine the integrity not necessarily of any specific game but of the wagering on the various prop bets. With the NFL making so much money from its various partnerships with sportsbooks (and with owners allowed to own equity in companies that operate sportsbooks), the league has an obligation to care about this.
There’s also a chance that, given the various challenges associated with ensuring that inside information is not misused, the league may decide to actively ignore the problem until it’s forced, via a public scandal, to deal with it.
That’s the premise of Big Shield. (No, I couldn’t pass up the chance to plug the book, which debuts tomorrow.) While the story itself is (hopefully) entertaining, it was designed to be a cautionary tale, aimed at showing how a problem could arise before the problem actually arises.
It’s just a matter of time. If it hasn’t happened already, and we just don’t know about it.
It’s one thing for the NFL to suspend players who used their phones to bet on another sport while at work. It’s quite another for the NFL to punish a player for doing something like sharing supposedly top secret football information with a family member or a friend.
The mere act of catching someone in the act would illustrate just how hard it is to catch someone in the act. Which means that the issue possibly will be ignored until it can’t be. And if/when that happens, the powers-that-be may act surprised — despite the fact that the ingredients and the temptations had been hiding in plain sight, for years.
