Five Years Into Legal Sports Betting, US Leagues Are Still Playing Catch-up
There has been a lot of recent news about how some professional and amateur sports have reacted to issues around the expansion of legal sports betting.
While a lot of the moves are good, at least on the surface, they also tell a story of leagues, teams and conferences not taking sports betting seriously enough. And instead of being proactive, they’ve been far too reactive despite the fact that they would like you to believe they have been the former.
Sports betting in the US didn’t start five years ago, even though a lot of people like to pretend that it did. It’s been taking place in Vegas and with local bookmakers for ages and offshore for decades. The thing that has changed is the accessibility of sports betting and the volume of people betting.
In recent weeks, we have seen in some instances how ill-prepared some sports were for the problems it could cause, even as they looked for new ways to make money from legal betting.
First, there’s the NFL, which has suspended more than a handful of players for gambling against league rules. The Associated Press had this story that credited the NFL and NFLPA with doing a much better job explaining the rules. That’s great! The problem is that the NFL should have been taking the education of players and staff much more seriously before recently and even before five years ago.
These quotes make it pretty obvious the issue of sports betting was given lip service before this year, which also makes you wonder how much less it was a point of emphasis both before and after the fall of PASPA.
“They made what has been broken very clear — after the fact,” Detroit linebacker Alex Anzalone said.
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“Last year, they didn’t give it to us like that,” Detroit cornerback Jerry Jacobs said of all those details. “They just told us we can’t gamble, but they didn’t tell us where.”
These quotes are anecdotal, but it’s hard to believe they don’t capture how gambling was presented to players and that it wasn’t presented seriously enough. More on a deep dive from ESPN talking to more than 50 players here.
You could excuse the laissez-faire attitude a bit more if the NFL and others hadn’t told us for decades that the legalization of sports betting would be the death knell of their sports. It clearly never was, and then the likes of the NFL go out and 1. make money from gambling partnerships and 2. not do enough education around sports gambling. If it’s the most serious threat to your sport, as Roger Goodell told us on more than one occasion, not nearly enough was being done. At least more is being done now.
This summer, college sports have been rocked by realizing that gambling has far more reach with athletes and students than most might have realized. The Iowa and Iowa State gambling scandals have brought that issue to the fore.
We have seen two deals struck in quick succession involving the Big Ten, the Big 12 and the monitoring body US Integrity (more here and here). Again, a move like this should be heralded because it’s taking the issue more seriously.
But it also highlights that the NCAA, member conferences and schools had thought its education efforts were enough, or were at least pretending they were. In fact, they were likely falling far short before and after the expansion of sports betting. We can safely say the problem is not isolated to Iowa. If we looked in enough closets, we’d find similar issues in every state in the union, including in ones that have no legal sports betting options.
Finally, there’s professional golf, where we have PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan saying bad fan behavior precipitated by gambling is uncommon. Meanwhile, we have players like Jon Rahm, one of the best golfers in the world, telling us it’s a problem every time he tees it up.
It’s obviously impossible to realistically police fan behavior when there are tens of thousands of fans at any given PGA Tour event. I would just expect a more candid discussion about the issue than dismissing it, which is clearly what has been happening at the upper echelons of US sports for some time now.
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