This is the world we live in
If you're going to have legal and accessible gambling, you're gonna have scandals
It apparently took less than three weeks to prove my Nieman Lab prediction for 2026 wrong.
Apparently, this will not be the year sports journalism gets tough on sports gambling. Not if the coverage of the most recent college basketball point-shaving scandal is any indication.
When the Terry Rozier-Chauncey Billups scandal broke in October, it felt like something broke within sports media. It was a multi-day story. Columnists talked about how the leagues and conferences and teams (but not their own outlets) were complicit in the culture of sports betting that made something like this possible, even if the overall tone was resignation.
The next scandal was met with relative crickets.
It was a one day story, if that. We’re a week out from the story breaking, and it’s off the front pages of all the sports media sites. There’s exactly one headline about the story on The Athletic’s men’s basketball vertical. It’s off the front page of ESPN, and out of the top headlines on the college basketball page. Scroll way way down and there are two stories linked in a package, including a column from Dan Wetzel that puts all the blame for the scandal on the individual perpetrators and none on the system that allows legal and accessible gambling.
This is the world we live in.
Up until 2018, you could name most of them off the top of your head.
The Black Sox scandal. CCNY in 1951. Boston College in the 1970s. Tulane in the mid-1980s. Pete Rose. Western University.1 Arizona State in 1994. Tim Donaghy.
I’m sure there are one or two I missed here. But you get the point. Gambling scandals were so relatively rare in sports that you could name most of them.
Can you name all of the gambling scandals in the past year?
ESPN tracks these stories, and with this latest one, there are more than 30 in the past three years alone.
Before sports gambling was legal and accessible, these scandals were massive news. Earth-shattering stories that transcended the sports page. At least, that’s my perception of them.
Now, they are just another story. One day, a column, and move on to the next day.
If you have legal and accessible gambling, you are going to have scandals like this. They are part of the world we have chosen to live in.
You can argue that this is just the price of doing business, that this is simple greed and that the legality of gambling makes actions like these easier to discover.
I would argue that what makes sports special and unique is our collective agreement that what we are seeing is on the level, that what is happening is not predetermined, that the players and coaches are playing and coaching to win and that the referees are doing their best to be unbiased2.
Every gambling scandal, every instance of point shaving or prop shaving, every time a player bets on his team, every instance of dumb greed, chips away at what makes sports special and unique.
This is the world we live in now.
Don’t remember this one? Here’s a refresher.
This is where you’re probably expecting a rant about the Bills-Broncos game. But honestly, get a stop on third-and-11 with two minutes to go and don’t turn the ball over five times. Also, the dumbest thing going around Bills social media is the notion that the NFL wasn’t going to let Buffalo win the game, because yes the NFL would work against having Josh Allen in the Super Bowl.
So, make gambling illegal again. Or, let's take the games like St. Bonaventure-Loyola off the books. It accomplishes little.
VPNs made it easy to gamble with offshore sportsbooks prior to the explosion of domestic books. Today, they're a must-have for internet security. Savvy gamblers (people not like me; the ones who put $400k on a Towson game) will simply move where they wager. It doesn't solve the problem.
The leagues and networks being in bed with FanDuel, DK, MGM, et al is the greater issue. When you watch a Bills game with the big FanDuel billboard in the endzone and see the DK ad during the break, followed by the BetMGM lines on The Athletic, and affiliate links and bonuses for new users embedded in articles, well, you get what you get.
Regulate it. Tax the hell out of it. But you can't put it back in the box.
I have had the same thoughts about sports gambling. I am glad you wrote a column about it.
You and your readers might also remember Ronnie Harmon admitting after his playing career that he accepted payments from gamblers to fumble four times during the Rose Bowl while playing for the University of Iowa Hawkeyes.
Bobby Riggs never admitted to wrongdoing, but an ESPN documentary revealed he threw the Battle of the Sexes match against Billie Jean King. He owed mobsters in Chicago a huge gambling debt. They forgave his debt when he agreed to intentionally lose.