From May 14, 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned PASPA and sports betting legalization began to spread beyond Nevada, through the end of 2022, two NFL players received suspensions for violating the league’s gambling policy.
From April through July of 2023, 10 NFL players received suspensions for violating the league’s gambling policy.
Seven of those are “indefinite” suspensions (which has, to this point, typically meant one full season) for betting on NFL games, and three of them are six-game suspensions for wagering on other sports markets while located in a league or a team facility or setting.
The overwhelming volume of investigations and suspensions means one or both of these statements must be true: Either NFL players betting on sports in violation of league rules expanded dramatically during the 2022-23 season, or the league’s mechanisms for catching players reached new heights during this most recent season.
Either way, the NFL has responded this spring and summer by amplifying its education efforts. From enlisting recently retired icon Tom Brady to deliver a responsible gambling message to staging offseason seminars with teams individually to hammer home six key rules within the league’s policy, the NFL is pushing hard to make this the last year in which any player will claim ignorance over what is and isn’t permitted.
The question now: Will it work?
Education, penalization the keys
“I do think that we will see it slow down,” said Matthew Holt, the founder and president of monitoring company U.S. Integrity, about the NFL’s sports betting problem. “The key is education. I am seeing it firsthand. I know because we’re doing so many on-site education sessions at colleges — I was just at Ole Miss last week, we were at the University of Illinois — that they’re taking it to heart. The NFL, as well as the other leagues and the NCAA, they understand the problem. We’ve seen the educational efforts extensively expanded, and I think those educational efforts will pay off.
“As the market matures, suddenly regulators aren’t stuck with the burdens of licensing and background checks and are able to get more into their responsibilities as enforcement officers, and the leagues and players are coming to understand that there are people watching all the time now. Certainly, I think that we will see less frequency, in the number of issues, than we did this spring and summer.”
SuperBook Sports Vice President of Sportsbook Operations Jay Kornegay agrees that while the number of violations won’t drop to zero overnight, it should decline significantly — in part due to the education efforts, and in part because players are seeing the penalties their colleagues are receiving.
“The severity of the penalties should continue, in my opinion, to send that message to those players that this is a serious violation,” Kornegay said. “You’re not just getting a slap on the back of your hands. This is something that could cost you your season or end your career.”
Four reasons NFL stands out
Why have athlete wagering violations been so much more of a problem in the NFL than in fellow major American pro sports leagues the NBA, NHL, and MLB?
There appear to be four significant considerations:
- The NFL has stricter rules than the other leagues: While wagering on games and players in your own league is not permitted in any of these organizations, only the NFL has formulated rules that restrict betting on other sports while located at a league facility, on a team bus, in a team hotel, etc.
- There are far more players in the NFL: The rosters are about five times larger in the NFL than in the NBA, with MLB and NHL landing in between the two. To an extent, it’s a numbers game. A league with nearly 2,000 players suiting up over the course of a season is almost certain to see more violations than a league with about 400 athletes.
- There’s more media coverage of the NFL: This isn’t to say that a violation in the NHL will just get swept under the rug because it’s by far the least magnified of the four leagues, but certainly there aren’t as many reporters looking to uncover every possible news item the way they do with the NFL.
- The NFL hasn’t yet had a major modern-day betting scandal: Even though many of them weren’t born yet when it happened, most players who make it to the big leagues in baseball are well aware of Pete Rose betting on MLB games and receiving a lifetime ban from the sport. Same for modern NBA players and the Tim Donaghy scandal. It’s less ingrained in NFL players’ heads — or at least it was less ingrained prior to this year — that sports betting is a threat to the integrity of your game and potentially a road to reputational ruin.
‘A never-ending game of cat and mouse’
With PEDs in sports, we’ve seen for decades a race in which the cheaters are often a step ahead of the testers. There’s a vague similarity with sports betting violators and enforcement, and during and after the 2022 NFL season, clearly the enforcers were closing that gap.
“Like any type of regulatory or criminal enforcement, it’s a never-ending game of cat and mouse,” Holt explained. “Right now, many of the people getting caught were easy to catch. When we look at college sports issues at Cincinnati and Alabama this year, and Iowa, Iowa State, none of those folks were hard to catch.”
Holt suspects the playing field is about to change a bit, though.
“Now, after a huge wave of suspensions, with a massive uptick in education as well as very public deterrents, we tend to see people not make the same mistake as frequently,” he said. “So I’m sure the folks doing things they shouldn’t will become more sophisticated, and we’ll continue to have to advance the methods and the amount and type of information that we’re able to digest and analyze.
“But the best deterrents are always education and seeing what the punitive damages are, and we’ve seen more punitive damages publicly in the last four months than we saw in the last four years. That’s probably a big wake-up call.”
Plenty of athletes think they can circumvent the rules by betting through friends or family — allegedly the case, for example, with Iowa State quarterback Hunter Dekkers — but Kornegay shared an oversimplified example that illustrates how even that has gotten more challenging to get away with.
“It’s very difficult, of course, for a well-known name to get through us. Let’s say Joe Burrow signs up for a mobile wagering account — we’re going to know about it,” Kornegay said. “But let’s just say it’s Chandler Burrow from Louisiana. I mean, that’s going to ring some bells too. That’s going to throw up some red flags. I can tell you for sure that we’re much more educated than we were 10 years ago on what to look for.”
And in the end, the bookmakers’ objective is the same as the leagues’ objective and U.S. Integrity’s objective.
“We’re on the same team. Integrity is our game as well,” Kornegay said. “If we don’t have the integrity of the game, our product, our business suffers. So we always want to protect that and we’re standing side by side with the leagues, the NCAA, and the regulators. We want to make sure that these games are not compromised in any way, because if they are and we’re taking bets on an event that’s predetermined, guess who gets hurt? We do, along with the league and its reputation.”
Although everyone in the industry has been quick to point out that there’s been no evidence throughout these post-PASPA waves of NFL games actually being compromised by the bets placed, the mere hint of a threat of that is why the rules are so strict and the penalties so harsh.
Have we seen the last of an NFL player violating the league’s rules and getting suspended? Probably not. But after the lengths everyone’s gone to in recent months to enforce and educate, it’s hard to envision another rash of investigations and suspensions like this one.
Sometimes you need to hit rock bottom before you clean up your act, and there’s reason to believe the spring and summer of 2023 will be looked upon in retrospect as a necessary bottoming out.
