Why ‘everyone loses’ if sports gambling scandals continue amid betting surge
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- 2018 Supreme Court ruling legalized sports betting and drove league partnerships.
- Exposure to online wagering increased scandals and weakened fan trust in results.
- Leagues and sportsbooks are limiting prop bets, raising monitoring to protect integrity.
Shortly after the Supreme Court in 2018 erased the 1992 federal law barring legalized sports gambling, pro sports leagues embraced what they’d previously treated as a vice that could become a virus.
Now you can’t turn on your TV or radio or computer or drive around without being inundated by the good news about all the money the sports gambling sites evidently can’t wait to give away from their multi-billion dollar profits.
So it’s appalling but hardly shocking to see a spike in gambling scandals attached to coaches and athletes — most recently in the last few months in the NBA and Major League Baseball.
Each time one of these has surfaced the last few years, I can’t help but think of one of the most memorable scenes in my favorite movie, “Casablanca.” Maybe you know that moment:
“I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here,” Capt. Renault (Claude Rains) tells Rick (Humphrey Bogart) as a pretext to shutting down his cafe.
Deftly timed, the casino dealer emerges and says, “Your winnings, sir,” as he hands Renault money.
The circumstances bring another movie line to mind for Patrick Rishe, the director of the sports business program at Washington University in St. Louis:
“‘This is the business we’ve chosen,’” he said, citing a line from The Godfather Part II.
Each scandal erodes trust
With the most prominent American sports leagues always seeking ways to boost profits, the notion of entering business with sports gambling sites proved irresistible.
Logically enough, really.
“The argument has always been, if we legalize this, we can better regulate and control and identify and detect behavior,” Rishe, a regular CNBC contributor who also has written for Forbes, said in a phone interview. “But more importantly … there’s an opportunity here to boost fan engagement.”
More fan engagement means more tickets purchased and a greater likelihood of watching games longer — especially when you can continue betting as the games go on.
All of that translates to better local media rights and higher corporate partnership rates. And so on.
“The ecosystem is quite complex,” said Jim Strode, the associate dean of undergraduate programs for Ohio University’s college of business.
Intricate as it might be, it’s put the sporting landscape on a perilous trajectory that leagues and teams are increasingly compelled to address — as MLB and the NFL did in the last few days.
Every time a coach or athlete is believed to have consorted with gamblers or limited his own participation in a game to influence the outcome of bets on his performance, acts that last year earned former Mizzou Tiger Jontay Porter a lifetime ban from the NBA …
Any time they allegedly purposely pitch balls to fraudulently win money for bettors, which led to indictments and arrests of Cleveland Guardians pitchers Luis Ortiz and Emmanuel Clase this week …
Or become entangled with organized crime, as in the most recent NBA scandal …
Trust erodes in the very dynamic that makes sports what it is: the presumed integrity of the result.
As I’ve thought about this, I’m reminded of how I used to scoff at my father, who was born in Iran and didn’t really understand American football but enjoyed watching games with me. He loved to playfully get under my skin by suggesting games were rigged because someone in the stands had just touched their nose to signal to a player.
Now, I’m not saying he was right. Or that we’re quite at a place where we can’t have faith in results.
But you can see that over the horizon from here, can’t you?
“It’s beyond just me placing a $15 bet on my app,” said Strode, who recently examined the influence of bettor behavior and bias in sports gambling markets. “It’s more do I trust, or even want to follow, the NBA or watch Major League Baseball anymore knowing that the outcome in certain parts may be pre-determined.
“And I watch it for the absolute opposite of that, right? Because I want to be thrilled and excited and not know what the outcome will be. And be nervous and all the fun things that as fans we go through the emotions on.
“I think that’s the core, and that’s what’s being threatened.”
‘A crazy world we live in these days’
To say nothing of the social consequences of the surge in sports gambling through the easy online access in most states — and including Missouri as of Dec. 1.
While you could say this is nothing new, given that illegal gambling and corruption in sports has a long and sordid history, there’s an entirely different aspect to it now.
“There are folks who never would have thought about sports gambling,” Strode said, “until they’ve seen a couple of commercials on TV offering free credits for them to wager.”
That’s a column in itself ... as is the pending NCAA element of this.
But it bears mention here that CNN reported in 2024 that texts and chats to the National Problem Gambling Helpline had increased around 800% since 2018, the year of the Supreme Court ruling, and call volume had grown nearly 80%.
The National Library of Medicine cited five separate studies concluding that “a significant association between sports betting and problem gambling” exists.
That manifests in many ways, most athletes can tell you, including well-documented vitriol online or even in casual settings.
“It gets weird to me sometimes when you have fans talking about it, because you’re just trying to go out there and live your life and play the game,” Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes said. “And, sometimes, they get really attached to you more than the regular fan because they have money on the line.”
Cognizant of that and the recent scandals, Mahomes called it “a crazy world we live in these days, seeing all this stuff happen.”
As for himself, Mahomes is so hyper-conscious of the rules that he made it a point to say his recent appearance on ESPN’s College GameDay as a guest picker didn’t include point spreads.
“I don’t get a lot of practice at that; they don’t let us do that stuff,” he said, later adding that he stays away from anything in that realm. “I don’t want to put myself in that position. … Your life’s so great, why mess with it, you know?”
‘A good crisis will not be spoiled’
In certain ways, those athletes who have messed with the seemingly increased temptation have provided a service.
As cautionary tales, for one thing, and to some degree as an indication that the system is working.
Because all concerned, including the gambling sites, have enormous incentive to promote the integrity of the results, we have what Rishe called “intel and analytics that are tracking this like never before.”
“And that’s how some of these oddities … and irregularities are being detected,” he said, later adding, “If you don’t have the means of tracking it, then the misbehavior could go on rampantly. And maybe it’s just whispers and behind the scenes and under the table.
“And all of a sudden you have this ethos of cheating that is very much akin to the ethos of cheating (in baseball’s steroid era).”
So with so many “shaken to the core,” as Rishe said, the shame in the short term is promoting awareness, discussion and change.
Or as Strode put it, “a good crisis will not be spoiled.”
One way these recent ones might be best exploited, Rishe and Strode both believe, is through reforms of prop bets — wagers on specific occurrences within a game or event that don’t necessarily affect the outcome (yet also could).
Often, Strode said, they’re the harder things “to be able to connect and certainly the easiest things that athletes can control.”
Of course, they’re also a fundamental part of the engagement the leagues covet — sometimes the very reason for someone to keep watching.
“If Joe the gambler decides to put money on a game and that game is out of reach in the first quarter,” Strode said, “Joe the gambler may want to try to recoup some of that money” through prop bets later in the game.
So finding that balance may be a challenge among the concerned parties, but there’s been movement that way.
‘Nobody wants to be the mark’
NBA commissioner Adam Silver last month on “The Pat McAfee Show” said that the league has asked several partners to “pull back some of the prop bets.” That reiterated pre-season reviews by the NBA and its partners of bet types most vulnerable to manipulation, and the league continues to review and evaluate in collaboration with the operators. Moreover, after the Porter episode last year and before the 2024-2025 NBA season, unders on two-way players and 10-day contract were removed.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred announced on Monday that prominent sportsbooks have agreed to establish a $200 limit on wagers focused on individual pitches, adding in a news release that such bets are “particularly vulnerable to integrity concerns.”
On Thursday, per the NFL Network, the NFL sent a memo to team officials saying it has “actively engaged with both state lawmakers and regulators, as well as with our sports betting partners, to limit — and where possible prohibited altogether — prop bets in the NFL.”
Those moves won’t solve everything, but they’re at least a start of sorts.
They’re also an acknowledgment that this vast and strange new world needs a fix well before it feels more and more plausible that the fix is in.
More of that action and reassurance can’t come soon enough.
Because “nobody wants to be the mark,” Strode said. “We bet because we assume that there is a level of fairness and chance involved. ‘Chance’ being the key word.”
And nobody wants to invest emotion, either, in something they might think is phony.
Rishe believes some of this phase is a natural byproduct of an embryonic endeavor, and that best practices will emerge to enhance guardrails.
But he also knows that any examples of lost trust in what’s real feed into perceptions that can be hard to undo.
“If there is a perception of lost integrity,” he said, “everyone loses.”
This story was originally published November 14, 2025 at 5:30 AM.