The NFL suspended four more players for violating the league’s gambling policy on Thursday.

Colts cornerback and kick returner Isaiah Rodgers — who ESPN reported placed approximately 100 bets, including on Colts games — was suspended indefinitely, as was Colts linebacker Rashod Berry and former Lions defensive tackle Demetrius Taylor, the fifth member of the 2020 Lions to be suspended this offseason under the gambling policy. Rodgers and Berry were waived by Indianapolis after the suspensions were announced on Thursday. Taylor was waived by Detroit last month.

The NFL also suspended Titans starting right tackle Nicholas Petit-Frere for six games, which he said in a statement to ESPN was for betting on other sports at the Titans facility. All four players have three years or fewer of NFL experience.

In April, the league announced five players were suspended for betting on the NFL or on other sports while on team property. In 2022, Jaguars receiver Calvin Ridley was the first player to be suspended for gambling on the NFL using a mobile sports betting app.

The Athletic spoke to several NFL agents whose clients were investigated for gambling this offseason to learn more about the league’s process. Agents said they received a letter from the NFL informing them that their client was being investigated for a potential gambling policy violation, which listed the dates of the player’s potential violations. The letter also instructed agents not to disclose the matter with anyone, which is why they have been granted anonymity for this story.

Given the unknown scope of the league’s gambling investigations and the easy access to mobile sports betting, one agent said, “There’s a part of me that thinks we are going to wind up dealing with 30 of these.”

Several agents said that they did not have the information they needed to prepare their clients to face NFL investigators, including access to the list and details of bets placed, like dollar amount, location and date. They cited difficulty in getting that information from FanDuel, which sometimes suspended the player’s account and only stores betting data for six months on users’ Account History page.

Users who sign up for mobile gambling apps like FanDuel agree to its privacy policy, which allows the company to share personal, demographic and usage information for a long list of reasons, including to “manage risk, or to detect, prevent, and/or remediate fraud or other potentially prohibited or illegal activities.”

Agents for several players investigated by the NFL said their clients shared an account with a family member or friend. The agents submitted affidavits on behalf of their clients, and the league interviewed players and family members or friends involved with the account, but without access to all of their client’s betting information, agents said they were unable to argue it wasn’t the player who placed a specific bet that violated the policy.

“It’s a situation where the NFL is holding all the cards,” said one of the agents. “It’s not a fair process.”

GO DEEPER

NFL players on gambling policy, suspensions: ‘That could have been any one of us’

The gambling policy is not collectively bargained, meaning commissioner Roger Goodell has the ultimate authority on determining player discipline. There is no set schedule with information on specific consequences for specific offenses, so players and their agents don’t know what to expect.

During a news conference last week, Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president of communications, public affairs and policy and health and safety initiatives, said that although the gambling policy is not collectively bargained, the union did have a voice in its implementation. Conversations between the league office and the union are the reason why the player policy is different from the staff policy (players are allowed to bet on non-NFL sports as long as they aren’t on team property; staff can’t).

The NFLPA could initiate those same conversations again, but agents are under the impression that the union isn’t interested in doing that right now. When asked directly about actions the union has taken or plans to take with the gambling policy during a call Wednesday announcing the hiring of new NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell, union president JC Tretter declined to comment. “I think we can circle back on that,” Tretter said. “I really want to keep the focus on Lloyd.”

“I think the union is doing a bad job,” said an agent who had a client investigated for gambling. “The NFLPA needs to go to the league and say, let’s get a grip on this thing from a collective standpoint.”

Another agent whose client was investigated for gambling said he wasn’t aware that the policy wasn’t collectively bargained. “The way the NFLPA presents it, I wouldn’t have known that,” he said. “It is a rule they seem to be on board with. Maybe they felt like they couldn’t fight it. In some ways that leaves room for interpretation (on discipline).”

The NCAA faced a similar situation, with a strict policy and an unanticipated number of athletes caught violating it. The organization was facing mass season-long suspensions under its previous policy, but on Wednesday, it simply changed the rules and relaxed the consequences for collegiate athletes who bet minimal amounts of money on sports that are not their own. The NCAA also released a detailed list of the consequences for specific bet amounts so athletes know exactly what to expect for discipline.

Don’t expect the same from the NFL.

“Integrity of the game is the highest single principle,” Miller told reporters last week.

The pretense of integrity may have been sold two years ago when the NFL entered into sports betting partnerships with DraftKings, FanDuel and Caesars Entertainment worth nearly $1 billion over five years.

Players benefit from a revenue share of the money generated by these league partnerships. DraftKings is listed as a licensing partner of the NFLPA, meaning the company can use NFL player images in marketing materials, while all three companies are listed among the union’s corporate sponsors. The NFLPA did not respond to questions about its business relationships with the companies.

Sports betting operators are obliged to report regulatory violations to state regulators. In the case of NFL players, regulatory violations companies would be responsible for flagging include account sharing and bets placed on the NFL. When the company detects unusual activity on an account, it will alert the state regulator, and, because they are business partners and the NFL will find out from the state anyway, the company also will alert the league office. FanDuel receives information from the NFL, and the app then screens users for matching information.

FanDuel has prohibited-person language in its house rules, and many states have similar language in their regulations, meaning that people who participate in a sport or have influence on an event are not allowed to bet on that sport.

“Anytime anyone logs into a regulated sports betting app in North America, they’re instantly geolocated,” said Matt Holt, the CEO of U.S. Integrity, one of two companies that work for the NFL to monitor the betting market and report any fishy activity.

Holt said his company is in the pilot stages of a new product called ProhiBet, which allows each sports league to upload an encrypted list of all players or staff along with their personal information, so if someone tried to place a bet on their own sport they would be prohibited from actually doing so. Holt said the NFL is participating in the ProhiBet pilot program, but that the product is too early in the pilot to have played a role in any of the NFL’s recent gambling suspensions.

“This will be a lot better moving forward because nobody wants to bust anybody after the fact,” Holt said. “That’s not in anybody’s best interest.”

There is no statute of limitations in the league’s gambling policy. One agent said his client was recently investigated for violations that took place before the 2022 NFL season.

“Now the (states) are basically clearing through the backlog and realizing oh s—, we should have been on top of this,” said one agent.

Several agents said their understanding is that state regulators initiated inquiries into their clients. Holt said one of the determining factors in whether a player gets flagged could be the state where he placed bets. “Depending on the state regulations and laws, and available resources, some states could be more apt to investigate this than others,” he said.

In the league’s news conference last week, NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport asked NFL chief compliance officer Sabrina Perel if the league was alerted when a player tried to make a bet via a gambling app. “Well, certainly they would see it,” she replied. “And yes, they would alert us.” Perel didn’t clarify who the “they” was — it could be the state regulator, the companies or both.

“The technology that is available to identify these things is probably a little bit ahead of the education,” Holt said.

Two of the agents interviewed say their clients are adamant that they were not taught the details of the gambling policy beyond the obvious edict: Don’t bet on the NFL. Petit-Frere said the same in his statement. That might explain why the NFL went out of its way this offseason to communicate it to players and staff, and to the media. The league is requiring rookies to sit through mandatory gambling educational sessions and sent Perel and her team out to 14 different teams during the offseason program to give in-person instruction. She and her team will visit at least six more teams during training camp.

(Photo illustration: Pavlo Gonchar / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)