This always has been a very stressful time of year for NFL coaches. They send their teams out into the world for a month or so of early summer vacation, some down time between OTAs and training camp, and stay awake at night worrying about all the ways those young men can derail the upcoming season or their own careers.
It’s why every coach delivers an annual speech reminding the team about the perils and pitfalls that 20-something-year-old millionaires may encounter away from the auspices of the team structure, along with tips to avoid them.
Still, each year at least several of them oblige low expectations with increasingly creative ways of running afoul of the rules and laws of society, rules and laws of the NFL, or rules and laws of plain old common sense.
This year, though, there is a new headache for teams to stress about, a new addition to the litany of potential transgressions that must be addressed.
It also happens to be the very thing that is making the league richer by the second.
Gambling, the now-omnipresent partner of all college and professional sports, an industry so intertwined with the NFL that there are books inside stadiums, mobile apps in which live odds fluctuate throughout games, dueling commercials among the league’s three “official” gambling partners on every broadcast, and an upcoming Super Bowl in Las Vegas, has become another tool to draw fans to the game.
Now it is the fastest way for a player to find himself ousted from it.
Seven NFL players, at least one assistant coach (Jets receivers coach Miles Austin) and an undisclosed number of team employees have been found to have violated the league’s gambling policy in the five years since the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting, essentially opening the door for gambling in states that wish to allow it. Thirty-three states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have launched legal betting markets since. That doesn’t include the latest news this week that the league is investigating Colts cornerback Isaiah Rodgers for possibly betting on his own team last season. That, at least, represents a less defensible conflict that can undermine public faith in the outcomes of games if not the differences in points by which they are decided. Most of the other violations, though, if the perpetrators are to be believed, seem petty, are based on which WiFi network was being used, or have nothing to do with football itself.
Yet the league insists on putting the full weight of its disciplinary penchant behind each and every innocuous incident it uncovers.
The only way things could be more hypocritical is if one of the league’s official gambling sponsors were to post an over/under line on how many players will be suspended for gambling this upcoming season. Even that wouldn’t be surprising at this point.
It isn’t just coaches who are reminding players of the league’s stances, cockeyed though they are, on what was once taboo but is now sanctioned. A video that will be shown to everyone in the league this spring will reportedly include an introduction by none other than Tom Brady. Yes, the quarterback the league once suspended four games for “violating the NFL policy on the integrity of the game” is now the spokesman for its moral compass. Apparently they couldn’t get Peyton or Eli Manning to do the job between filming their spots for Caesars.
However ridiculous the rules are – and they are – they are the rules. Anyone who works for any employee knows there are actions that are prohibited. The easiest way to avoid a stern sentence from the shield in this case is to avoid gambling in all its available forms.
“It’s easy to gamble,” Jets linebacker C.J. Mosley said this week. “You just download an app. I’m not really a gambler so I don’t really have that problem. But you just have to be smarter, you have to deal with your surroundings, know the rules, and at the end of the day, really, just don’t gamble. If you don’t know what’s going on or know the exact rules, just don’t do it.”
That paradigm used to work well. There was a clear line that could not be crossed by anyone. Gambling equals bad. It was simple.
Things aren’t so simple any longer, and the old answers don’t work.
“Honestly, I’m just as surprised as everyone else when it pops on the ticker,” Mosley said of gambling-related news regarding players. “I’ve been in this league a long time and I don’t think I’ve heard of or seen this many suspensions from gambling. I don’t know. I hope they get the message now. But it’s not good at all. You just have to be smarter than that.”
The players do, sure. But the league has an obligation too. Moreso.
The NFL, a league that once prohibited players from attending fantasy football events, dove headfirst into gambling like Scrooge McDuck into his vault as soon as it became clear it could produce revenue. It bent whatever ethical high ground it had to accommodate profit, at least at the highest suit-wearing levels of the sport.
What it hasn’t done well enough is adjust how it addresses those who now live in a new world it helped create.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday’s Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.