So ubiquitous, and acceptable, is sports gambling these days that Clay Travis offers free prop bets for March Madness games on The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show.
And it’s not only the successor to the great Rush Limbaugh pushing gambling on the nation’s most revered — and popular — conservative talk show. It’s the royal family of football, the Mannings, plumping Caesars Sportsbook in ads that seemed to flood the airwaves leading up to Super Bowl LVI. And it’s household-name athletes like Mike Tyson, Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Jerry Rice, and Wayne Gretzky, and big-screen staples like Ben Affleck and Jamie Foxx, using their names and reputations to sell sports betting.
Sports channels feature shows where odds and gambling bets are the sole topic of discussion. One’s daily TV viewing is interrupted continually by ads for betting aps. Why, the major American sports leagues themselves — the NFL, the NBA, MLB, the NHL — all have signed big-money partnerships with betting platforms. ESPN has its own online sportsbook.
I wonder if anyone foresaw this gambling bonanza 50 years ago when Americans still had to trek to the Nevada desert to legally play the tables or the machines. Or, more to the point, even six years ago, when the Supreme Court threw open the sportsbook doors by striking down the Amateur Protection Act, making sports betting legal in the states.
Sports betting has exploded since that 2018 decision, as 38 states plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia have legalized sports betting of some sort, although not all have enacted it.
And, amazingly, in those six years, all the dangers of sports betting drummed into our heads over these many decades have mysteriously been memory-holed, vanished like the money you put on that huge point spread that shrinks radically during garbage time.
With a wave of the justices’ hands, the age-old dangers of game fixing and point shaving and general corruption by unsavory influences have all gone away. So strong has been the push for legal sports gambling that scandal and corruption have been washed, and wished, into oblivion. Sports gambling offers no threat to the integrity and competitive purity of sports, we are told, because, well, the gambling people say so. And besides, there is just so much money to be made by all in WagerWorld, and which state in its right mind is not going to spread its arms to embrace the millions flowing to it in gambling taxes?
Nothing shady to see here, folks. Certainly no corruption.
Well, the last year or so has not been kind to the pushers of sports betting. We as a society are up to our necks in sports gambling scandals. It turns out what was up until a couple of decades ago illegal — and, since the dawn of recorded history, immoral — does carry with it some dirty baggage.
Problems With Prop Bets
The latest contretemps involves prop bets on college athletes. Prop bets — proposition bets — are wagers on aspects of the game unrelated to the final score. For example, some actual bets from the Elite Eight games last weekend include: Will Purdue’s Zach Edy score 22.5 points against Tennessee? Will North Carolina State’s D.J. Burns dish out more than 2.5 assists in the Duke game? But they can be even more atomistic, like an over/under on how many three-pointers player A will make in a game.
Such bets are legal in many states, and the president of the NCAA, Charlie Baker, who wants a nationwide ban on them, worries that athletes will be harassed for failing to deliver on prop bets. Baker expressed his worry in January:
All that chatter about who’s playing, who’s not playing. Who’s sore, who’s not sore. What’s going on with the team you’re playing? What do you think your chances are? Which is just classic chatter, where — in a world where people are betting — takes on a whole new consequence.
More to the point of prop betting, Baker limned the real-world dangers the following month, as reported in the Wall Street Journal:
You literally could have certain situations where somebody just says, “Look, you’re my friend. We’ve been friends a long time. I lost 500 bucks last week because you didn’t play well. And I still love you, but I’ve got to make rent next week. All I need you to do is miss your first two free throws.”
Could this happen? Sure. Does it happen? We can only guess. But the fact that it could happen showcases the potential of corruption in prop betting. You, the innocent bettor, never know if those free throws were missed on purpose.
San Diego State athletic director J.D. Wicker said players, who are out and about on campus, attending class and so forth, are ripe for pressure from bettors:
[T]here’s a lot more opportunity for one of them to be pressured, for them to have something negative happen because maybe they miss the free throw or they miss the over the under, all those types of things.
According to CBS Sports: “A NCAA survey from last September showed 10% of respondents were aware of an athlete being harassed in person or online. The number of Division I athletic departments that faced a gambling issue or problem tripled from 2019 to 2023.”
Already a potential prop betting scandal has erupted in the pro game, where Toronto Raptor center Jontay Porter is being investigated for his possible part in two lucrative prop bets. In two games, in which he exited early or played minimally, millions of dollars came in on the under in prop bets involving him, turning those prop bets into the most lucrative NBA wagers on those particular days. Sam Quinn wrote at CBS Sports:
But the Porter situation, pending the results of the investigation, has a chance to spiral into one of the worst sports betting scandals since legalization began to spread in 2018. According to ESPN, the NBA is investigating the integrity of games Porter himself participated in. If they do indeed find evidence that he either made bets against himself or had involvement with anyone that bet against him, that would represent a first since the sports gambling boom started six years ago.
“People were trying to do whatever they could to bet Jontay Porter props [in the first of the two games],” one source told ESPN. “And then, just a few days ago, the same thing. We had a bunch of people trying to bet under for more.”
Multiple Scandals
Apart from prop bets, recent times have not been kind to the gambling cause. The Temple University men’s basketball team is being investigated by U.S. Integrity, a gambling watchdog group, for “suspicious wagering activity” on its games. In one game, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) was a narrow favorite over the Owls, but during game day, that number ballooned to 8 points, closing at game time at 7. No injuries or other factors were at play to affect such a large point swing, which aroused the notice of investigators. UAB won the game, 100–72. Since that loss, Temple has been 5–0 against the spread.
Last year, University of Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon was fired amid suspicious activity. According to Sports Illustrated, he allegedly gave crucial information about Alabama’s starting pitcher for a game against Louisiana State University to another party, who promptly tried to bet $100,000 on LSU. The bet raised suspicion, as that particular game had generated virtually no action prior to his bet. Additionally, the amount of the wager far exceeded the sportsbook’s house limit, which also set off alarms.
In the Hawkeye State, athletes from both the University of Iowa and Iowa State University have been embroiled in gambling controversies lately, accused of betting while underage; betting on games, including on their own teams; and betting under false names. Charges were dropped on four athletes because law enforcement used illegal means to monitor their betting activity, but over a dozen college kids have pled guilty to underage gambling.
The most high-profile sports betting scandal of the day has a different flavor. It involves bookies and gambling debts in a state, California, that has not yet legalized sports gambling. And it involves Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani, baseball’s biggest star and the highest-paid athlete in American sports history.
The modern-day Babe Ruth — excellent pitcher and fantastic hitter, like Ruth — is embroiled in a betting scandal stemming from his longtime interpreter taking money from Ohtani’s bank account and sending it to an alleged bookie. The question is whether the translator stole the money from Ohtani’s account, or whether Ohtani was paying the debts for the translator. The case is ongoing, and facts about it are fluid. Ohtani has denied involvement in the controversy.
Protecting Sports
Those critical of legal gambling are usually characterized as bluenoses, cheek-sucking prudes who want to take the fun out of everything.
A better characterization is that they simply want to protect the purity and integrity of the games they love. There are myriad ways for athletes to negatively affect the games they are playing — point shaving, tanking, faking injury, throwing the game. It is difficult to impossible to keep corruption out of sports when gambling is legal and widespread and encouraged by media and society.
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