The NFL Has a Gambling Problem
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I watch very little football and almost zero of the highlights. But on Sundays when I visit my parents there’s always a game on, so I watch. I like the game. Hell, I used to love the game, enough to even consider playing another season after getting a concussion at age 14. But I was unprepared at the start of this season for just how much has changed in the way the games are broadcast and what the advertising looks like.
Yesterday I lost count of how many ads I saw for Caesars, Draft Kings, et al. When the Packers game went to halftime we put on the NFL Network and watched *highlights. As they roll through the previous games that day they get to the Sunday Night game and…the biggest graphic on the screen is the spread. Nobody said anything out loud about betting, but as they laid out what the two teams had to do to win the spread was simply there, a reminder that the only reason a fan from outside of those two respective cities would care about the game is the action they could get in on. Of course this has always been the case with these national broadcasts, but now the sotto voce implication of betting on the game has shifted to a bullhorn wielded by Peyton Manning in your living room.
*Tangential: Those highlights. were…they were not being done by professionals. The broadcasters were legitimately bad. It was like listening to minor market sports talk radio. Growing up with ESPN in the 90’s skewed our sense of how easy it is to do that job. It is evidently very very hard to make it look easy.
Don’t think the owners are ready at all Rusty
When these critically important calls are being made by Part-Time workers( because you know Billionaire owners need to save costs) and massive sports betting is going on, well that’s an obvious narrative that seems likely to be really happening.
FWIW, I too am shocked at the amount of advertising for sports gambling.
Used to be verboten, now everywhere
Warning: Following comment is tangential, possibly irrelevant, not particularly original – but all I’ve got.
My husband counsels people with actual opioid addictions and he sez: Sports gambling is the new opioid crisis.
Send in the clowns.
Gambling everywhere and on everything is becoming our new national pastime. The speculation layer is real. I don’t think your comment is tangential, irrelevant or unoriginal. It’s a useful observation - thanks!
No disagreement with your detailed points Rusty, and your point differential curves were very interesting, but a couple points to add some broader context.
Thanks, Hubert. Really great thoughts! My own thoughts follow based on the order of your comment:
you’ve got that right
Right on cue. It’s like they read your piece Rusty!
I unequivocally subscribe to the big picture thesis of this article, which is: the NFL’s wholehearted embrace of gambling will lead to unintended consequences that threaten its viability.
I also concur with the premise that the referees are the vulnerable target were someone to devise a game-fixing scheme, given their outsize influence on the outcomes (as Rusty demonstrated) and their meager financial compensation. This is easily remedied, however, simply by increasing their pay (and potentially by adding an incentive comp plan). Closing this loophole would not even cost that much - maybe $1m per team. Yes owners are cheap, and often foolishly so, to the point of self-harm, but there are other constituents in the value chain here - the NFLPA, the broadcast partners - who could be made to chip in.
At the end of the day, there is simply not that much money to be made in game fixing - not enough to tempt the players, or at least anybody good enough to be worth bribing. (The days of Arnold Rothstein possessing the power and wealth and Shoeless Joe needing some pocket cash are long gone. Today the eighth guy off the Miami Heat bench makes more than any gangster.). Legalized sports gambling is highly regulated. There is KYC compliance requirements and the casinos are highly attuned to irregular wagering patterns. The private (illegal) gambling market is small. No neighborhood bookie is taking $1m action on a single game. So the cost of paying the refs enough to blunt their financial motivation to fix games is by no means very expensive. If someone can pay Tony Romo $17m to blabber; they can find a similar amount to supplement the officials’ pool for guys who actually matter to the game.
Tangential: officiating in the NFL DOES suck. Not in the sense that the calls are bad or blown; but in the way officials so frequently and inelegantly intervene in the game. They are full on participants. And nobody wants to see it. As an entertainment product, pro football is significantly harmed by referee interference. If I were an owner or member of the competition committee, my top priority would be putting that genie back in the bottle.
Great post, Michael. Since I think the risk lies as much or more in narrative land as it does in reality land, I don’t know that appropriately paid and employed officials completely solves the issue, but it would certainly make me feel a LOT better as a fan.
The same has happened in the UK with Football (soccer to you guy across the pond), Cricket and to a lesser extent, Rugby Union.
No broadcast of a live sports game is without the ads for online betting companies. In the case of Football and Rugby these are before, at half time and after. Remember that over here we don’t break the game for the convenience of the advertisers. With cricket the ads come when there is a change of batter, or a drinks break etc. always at natural gaps in play.
There have been several high profile cricket betting scandals with players found guilty of being influenced by betting syndicates. When you can bet on when the first wicket will fall, or if a bowler will ball a “No ball” in a specific over, you can see the opportunity.
A few years ago a few football match were called off because the floodlights failed in the second half. An investigation found that there was a huge amount of money bet on the team which was losing at the time. The main gamblers were Asian betting syndicates. See this article, point 3. The Joy of Six: football abandonments | Soccer | The Guardian
And now to the pinnacle of team sports, Rugby Union. There is thing in Rugby called scrums, where 8 member of each team attempt to push each other off the ball as a way of restarting the game. Go watch a few. Even experienced commentators, former players, can be baffled at some of the penalty decisions at scrum time. The opportunity for influencing the outcome of the match is quite large, unless one side is really dominant in the scrum. Luckily in Rugby we have a TMO (Television Match Official) who is watching the game on the broadcasters feeds and can call the referee’s attention to foul play if the ;latter missed something. But at scrum time…
Maybe I’m way too pessimistic.
I honestly think what’s almost inevitable is that credible evidence of fixing will surface, calling the whole artifice of sports and payouts into question. Like credible evidence of collusion, chicanery and corruption in virtually every other arena of politics (many), business (Enron, Facebook), bureaucracy (alphabet agencies and privacy), high finance (bailouts), medicine and pharma (?) - need I go on? - it’ll be another chip at the facade that is current culture.
I think this one will be different. Like Pete Rose, a wide-scale scandal here directs right at the Joe Six-pack big middle of culture, and could be a final nail in the confidence coffin. What happens when there’s virtually nowhere to turn to find any stability?
The NFL has done a superlative job of bringing the game and the feel of the game to its viewing public. It also has down time between each play that is extended when penalties are called. In a greatly oversimplified view these two factors combine to (a) invite scrutiny and (b) promote discussion (c) allow beverage replenishment.
Towards the speculative nature of everything has an Intrade type venture surfaced?
It already happened in the NBA years ago. People still gamble, even more than they did back then. Gamblers love gambling. It’s what they do.
I can see it actually creating an entirely new speculation layer ala the Keynsian Beauty Contest. When you’re placing a bet on the Raiders it’s not because you think that’s who will win, but it’s who you think the fixers want to win. Hell, this could be more fun than actually betting based on the metrics of the teams and instead focusing on the direction that the money is flowing. All the public money is going heavy into KC -3 1/2 but the sharps are quietly piling into the Pats? Take the Pats and the points.
“… who you think the fixers want to win. Hell, this could be more fun than actually betting based on the metrics of the teams and instead focusing on the direction that the money is flowing. All the public money is going heavy into KC -3 1/2 but the sharps are quietly piling into the Pats?”
Wasn’t this the reality of meme stock play? It’s like an onion of narrative derivatives.
My concern/interest is in the tipping point where the widespread public narrative and collective attitude is that everything is hopelessly corrupted and untrustworthy.
We’re a very industrious people, Ed. If there’s something upon which we can cast speculation we will never give up hope.
The arbitrary enforcement of the rules is what makes the game so American. We’ve got thousands of pages of laws and regulations that would absolutely cripple society if enforced, but we all generally ignore them most of the time and follow our sense of what the rules should be.
I ran right into this firsthand during some work recently. A certain overseas country adopted a section of our regulations word for word, but didn’t adopt all the waiver processes, workarounds, and public use exemptions. End result? Impossible to do business within the rule set that they literally copied from us.
Both true and endlessly infuriating to me personally! Enough so that I actually wrote briefly about this a couple of years ago.
I do think, however, that the nature of football and how it is played makes this more true than it is for almost any other sport. As others have pointed out, rugby, Aussie rules and soccer are possibly in the same neighborhood.
An arbitrary set of rules and regulations is what makes day care, particularly for infants, an impossible business in the US. The strict model required to comply with state regulations (which touch every aspect of the care operation) raises costs to the point where margins collapse if you don’t raise prices or revenue collapses if you do.
This is what happens when the Mandarin class becomes a thing unto itself.
(Not intending to thread drift - just pointing out that the NFL refs and the gambling consequences are a subclass of a more meta - regulations and unintended consequences archetype.)
I know we’re done with the trivial stuff like sports gambling, but this popped up in my feed yesterday and I found it interesting.
The networks that carry NFL games cash checks from Caesars, Draft Kings, MGM, et al. The NFL functionally endorses gambling in a sport where the reffing can impact the outcome in an outsized way. But the moment a player wants to get in on the grift? No no no you can’t do that, it will hurt the image of the game and spoil the purity of sports gambling. A full season suspension for placing bets–on his own team to win–in a game he wasn’t playing in? Very bad. He should have stuck to the League-approved violations, like beating up a woman, or beating up a second, unrelated woman.
My fickle attention was redrawn to this topic this morning, thinking of the outsized effect of last Sunday’s call(s).
Setting aside the impact of widespread online sports betting on personal finance, debt, marriage and other relationships, and potential damage to impressionable teens, now that we have a little data would it be possible to suss out some statistical ‘special cause’ variation in game outcomes since the implementation of betting?
Mark me as interested but not competent in the effort. And apologies in advance for re-booting this thread.
I think that one could solve some share of the problem by simply identifying Penalty EPA over time. I strongly suspect this dataset already exists. The problem with that, of course, is that it can’t handle uncalled penalties in a sea of randomness, which lies at the center of why I think this is such a big can of worms: That holding call at the end of the game on Sunday was absolutely within the confines of the rule and absolutely of a magnitude that didn’t get called in numerous other instances in the game and in general.
That randomness is why, short of literally finding refs betting or getting paid off, this risk doesn’t go away and the dominant role of this conversation in NFL discussions doesn’t go away, so long as betting is around.
The NFL continues to provide me with a reason to resurrect this thread.
So a six game suspension for gambling on non-NFL games is now the new standard. The reason seems to be it was done from a ‘team facility’, but isn’t the whole pitch of Draft Kings et al that you can gamble from your phone anywhere, any time? If these guys had waited until they were in their driveways would it have been kosher? What an absolute mess the NFL has made of themselves.
An utterly bizarre little finger trap they’ve gotten themselves into. It’ll be interesting to see how the NFLPA decides to appeal this, and what arguments the NFL feels compelled to trot out other than “rules is rules.”
That call, IMO, was “the perfect crime” for a part-time employee to make $millions off of some person’s or syndicate’s $Billion bet
Now you’ve got a throwaway account on Reddit claiming to be a personal friend of Will Levis - previously a +4000 to +6000 long-shot to be the first overall pick at most sportsbooks - also claiming that he was telling friends and family that the Panthers were drafting him at #1. NFL Draft books are pretty thin, but it pushed Levis at #1 to as low as +400 overnight. An insane odds shift that has largely retraced.
The derivative economies of professional sports are astounding, and the NFL just seems to keep trying (or accidentally) to find more and more of them.