THE NFL HAS CREATED A MONSTER: PLAYERS WILL KEEP GAMBLING ON GAMES
Roger Goodell tries to minimize a scandal with a holiday-weekend news dump, but with season-long suspensions of three more players — one who wagered on his team — the league has an unstoppable problem
The league that damages brains also thinks it can control your mind. The NFL manipulates the dissemination of harmful information about its $20-billion-a-year brand — the vaunted Shield — via the conveniently timed, strategically minimized news dump. In the latest case, Roger Goodell and his minions know the Fourth of July weekend is upon us, with a record 51 million Americans poised to travel 50 miles or more from their homes.
Those people, and everybody else staying put, hardly were outraged Thursday that four more players were suspended for gambling violations. Or that three were banned indefinitely after betting on NFL games — including a starting cornerback and kick returner, Isaiah Rodgers, who placed at least one wager of $1,000 in a game involving his team, the Indianapolis Colts, among his more than 100 bets on an online sportsbook account. If travelers even noticed the headlines, they were too busy packing suitcases and fighting airport drama to care. Vacations are meant to be enjoyed, without stressing about sports, and the commissioner knows this when he approves story leaks about gambling and performance-enhancing-drugs busts on June 29.
Road trip! Isaiah who?
What Goodell would like you to believe: Rodgers and two others banned for the 2023 season if not beyond — his Colts teammate, Rashod Berry, and free agent Demetrius Taylor — are singular gambling rogues who’ve been identified and punished as an otherwise clean league carries on. What he hasn’t explained to the masses is how extensively the league looked into whether Rodgers threw games, only having an unnamed source tell ESPN that an investigation “did not find evidence of any game manipulation.” Why should we buy that as gospel? The NFL, you see, doesn’t want its lucrative business with sportsbooks to be tainted by the very real possibility that players will keep using inside information — if not directly, then through the betting apps of associates — to compromise and scandalize games. Goodell and the 32 owners want the 46.6 million Americans who bet on the NFL last season to keep gambling in 34 states and the District of Columbia, where sports wagers are legal after the Supreme Court’s reckless decision to whip open the sleazy doors.
I do not apologize for stating, again, that I trust nothing about this disgusting money grab by greedy billionaires who don’t need suspicious revenue streams. It’s very tidy for Goodell to make scapegoats of Rodgers, Berry and Taylor — and Tennessee offensive tackle Nicholas Petit-Frere, who was suspended six games for placing wagers on non-NFL sports at his team’s training facility — because even the most engaged fans don’t know much about any of them. The pressing issue is whether the league ever would probe star players suspected of gambling. Bringing down a big-name player — or two or three or 10 — also would bring down the league’s betting empire. The public wouldn’t trust it anymore. So I think we know the answer.
Rodgers is the designated pariah here. Ninety-nine percent of the other players are gambling saints. Such is the corporate message when delivering murky news at a date on the calendar when you are preoccupied. It’s called summer, and the league doesn’t care about you and your bets, other than its wish that you keep laying down more.
A bettor won’t stop seeking action for his itch because Isaiah Rodgers and others were banned one season. But a more famous Rodgers, a quarterback in New York, a future Hall of Famer? That would give bettors pause and prompt a mass purging of apps, killing the sportsbooks and restoring order to a gambling circus once viewed as a menace by the NFL and other leagues. Scandals are inevitable in the current anything-goes culture, and the likelihood won’t fade because of a few low-level suspensions, even after the bust of wide receiver Calvin Ridley last year. You’d be a fool to think players who want to bet would be fazed by bans that won’t be remembered when training camps start next month. I mostly want to know if the league is concerned that difference-making players — quarterbacks, left tackles, defensive backs, pass rushers, kickers — could buckle from integrity lapses and impact the outcomes of games and prop bets. I need more than a news release and immediate firings, with Colts general manager Chris Ballard cutting both players and issuing more Captain Obvious words: "The integrity of the game is of the utmost importance. As an organization we will continue to educate our players, coaches, and staff on the policies in place and the significant consequences that may occur with violations."
Not once has Goodell addressed Big Gambling, at length, at a televised news conference. He should be having briefings regularly and elaborately for the fans, considering the league merrily takes money from tens of millions who feed the NFL-endorsed sportsbooks. This is a significant problem for consumers. If they choose to wager on NFL games, shouldn’t they be confident that players aren’t sabotaging those investments for their own financial benefit? Rather than voice assurances, Goodell hides behind one of his executive subordinates.
“Everybody should know when somebody has been found to be engaged in sports betting that there are ramifications with real discipline, serious discipline … because the integrity of the game has to be held at such a high standard that there’s no tolerance for those sorts of behaviors,” Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president of communications, said last week on a media video call. “And hopefully by being transparent and offering some deterrent to others, we can ensure that if it were to happen, it doesn’t happen again. So while this may not be the last time we have this conversation, I am sure that we’ll treat it the same way in an effort to try to deter future acts of sports gambling so that we can make sure that our game lives up to the highest level of integrity.”
Dealing with a money-making disease that could cost problem gamblers their jobs, families and lives — and put young gamblers in early life deficits — the league certainly is casual about its public discourse. Enlisting Tom Brady to tape a video that warns players about gambling, and how it imperils the sport’s integrity, won’t stop all of them from dispensing inside information to family members and friends. Nor will camp visits from league officials who will wag fingers and spread the six “don’ts” of gambling: don’t bet on the NFL … don’t gamble at the team facility or during a road trip … don’t share inside information … don’t have someone else bet for you … don’t visit sportsbooks during the NFL season … and don’t play fantasy football.
Sure. Right. Copy that. Roger and out. Just as it’s too simple to run a stop sign these days, it’s too easy to circumvent the commish’s credo. If Rodgers could jeopardize a career paying almost $1 million a year to place a $1,000 over/under prop bet on the rushing yards gained by a Colts running back, what stops anyone else from being more discreet and trying to hit a jackpot? It’s not as if the league has cameras recording every movement and breath of a player. More gambling will happen. And so you know, the NFL only will tell us when the names are minimal and the timing is opportune.
Sports betting is beyond control at this point, until Congress intervenes. And the league isn’t motivated to slow the momentum, in cahoots with broadcast networks empowered to show six sportsbook commercials per game in a bonanza that generated $314.6 million last year. The culture should lead to a guarded sensibility that some star players will gamble, as Paul Hornung and Alex Karras did 50 years ago, before there were phones and apps and fortunes to be made with the press of a thumb.
The gambling scandals didn’t end Thursday. They’re just beginning, in a league that has created its own runaway monster. Enjoy your vacation, then return with a realization that your NFL wager could be wrecked by players who have money on the game.
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.