The Lesson To Learn From Recent US Sports Betting Scandals

The news about the intersection of athletes and sports betting reached a fever pitch this week.

• The Jontay Porter situation resurfaced. A Brooklyn man was charged in federal court for allegedly encouraging Porter to clear gambling debt by pulling out of games early for betting purposes. Porter had already been banned from the NBA.

• One Major League Baseball player was banned for life for betting on baseball games, while four others were suspended for a year.

• Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter pleaded guilty to fraud charges in the wake of the revelation he had racked up huge debts and stole money from the Los Angeles Dodgers star.

Here’s what I take from the first two stories, at least: Education efforts for the US sports ecosystem are still to some extent inadequate and/or ineffective.

Let’s start here: The players had to know better. Porter certainly knew what he was doing. It’s pretty hard to believe that baseball players think it would be OK to bet on baseball games, given the history of the sport.

But that arguably makes it worse that these things are happening, that players are getting lengthy suspensions, in some cases for betting almost meaningless amounts of money.

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Here’s what it makes me question on the education front:

• Do the players know there’s at least a decent chance that they can be caught betting on sports? At least some players have to think “there’s no way they are gonna know that I’m doing this.”

• How far are education efforts going beyond the top-level players? Baseball is particularly vulnerable to this with the huge minor-league system that feeds into MLB. And beyond the players themselves, how much are team and league staff, referees, scorekeepers and other officials being trained? There are also tens of thousands of college athletes and staff; are they getting enough training and information?

• Is everyone clear on which sportsbooks are legal and which aren’t? The case of Ohtani’s interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, made it seem like it wasn’t something he was aware of.

• The Porter story also brings up another avenue. If anyone in the sports ecosystem is confronted with a situation about match-fixing, do they know what to do? What’s the process for reporting it, and is it handled in such a way that the person would feel comfortable? If the allegations are true, Porter made the situation worse for himself by going along with the scheme instead of reporting that he was being pressured into pulling out of games so he could get out of debt. And given a choice, the NBA or any league would rather shut down a fixing attempt before it happens rather than react after the fact.

What’s clear is these public cases, including a variety of NFL players who have been suspended for gambling, will serve as a deterrent moving forward. But there’s still work to be done on the education and integrity fronts.

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