What we do and don't cover in sports gambling scandals
Catching up on some coverage of legal and accessible gambling
Catching up on some of the news and coverage around sports gambling, and there are two stories from The Athletic that are worth chatting about.
The first came out Tuesday as part of the site’s anonymous NBA player poll. Nearly a third of the league’s players responded to the poll. In all, 46 percent of those players said they felt the NBA’s relationships with sports books was a bad thing for the league, while 34 percent said they thought it was a good thing.
Players who thought gambling partnerships are good for the NBA focused, not surprisingly, only the money. Gambling brings in money, sports is a business, that kind of thing. Players who thought the partnerships are bad focused on how it impacts them and the game. A majority of the responses - if not all of them - mentioned how gamblers send direct messages to players threatening them. One player said:
I personally hate gambling. Hate everyone talking about parlays this, parlays that. I hate getting DMs in my Instagram talking about, ‘You f—– up my parlay.’ I hate people sending me threats because I messed up their parlay.
Another player said:
The gambling partnerships are horrible for the league because you guys are selling your soul for the worst types of people in your fan base, and they don’t see us as human beings anymore, which again, they never did. But you’re just going to start seeing more and more of — I hope not — you’re going to see more and more people throwing games because of under-the-table deals.
Parlays and under-the-table deals bring us to the second story, which
shared with me.
Mike Vorkunov reported that the federal investigation that began with Jontay Porter is becoming broader and potentially more damaging. From Vorkunov:
The investigation has led to what may become one of the most far-reaching scandals to hit sports in decades. The Porter case is also linked to investigations into match-fixing across college sports, sources said, and five schools are being investigated by the federal government for their possible ties to the scheme … The federal investigation has cast a cloud over college sports and the legalized gambling industry as they await the next turn and wonder how much more expansive the FBI’s findings will be, and who could be implicated. It is the largest conspiracy case yet since sports gambling was legalized for most of the country seven years ago, and the most prominent since the Arizona State point-shaving scandal of the mid-1990s.
There are some interesting points that I learned from Vorkunov’s story. One answers the question of how players who are making millions of dollars can still get snared in betting scandals. Porter, according to the story:
had fallen into “significant” gambling debt to some of the men, prosecutors said, and decided to work his way out of it by helping them win bets on his play. Sources say that poker games, potentially rigged ones, are believed to have been one way some players could have been ensnared.
Vorkunov also writes that “the sports world has never been closer to gambling.” I get the point he’s making. I’d argue that the sports world (and sports media) has always been intertwined to sports gambling, but what was implicit is now very explicit so I see the point. Gambling’s gone from the cryptic comments at the end of broadcasts to the headline section of ESPN.
As I read the details of Vorkunov’s reporting and the Porter story in particular, I got thinking about how sports journalism is covering gambling stories. It’s a point that really came home to me as I was talking to a student who’s doing a project about sports media and sports gambling.
Let’s look at it like this: The biggest sports gambling scandal of this new era is Jontay Porter giving gamblers insider information about how he was going to take himself out of a game so they could bet the under on his individual stats. On its face, this is bad on every level. If the biggest sin of sports gambling is fixing games, then a player fixing their own individual stats is probably the second biggest.
Coverage of this story has focused on Porter’s actions, and Vorkunov’s reporting drives home the fact that Porter was just galactically stupid here. That fits a trend that gambling scandals are covered primarily through an individual lens.
What’s missing is the big picture. There is little to no larger interrogation of the fact that we could easily bet on Jontay Porter's individual performance in a March NBA regular season game.
Jontay Porter was an undrafted bench-warmer who had played in 37 NBA games over the course of two seasons when this all went down. He never scored more than 14 points in a single NBA game. Unless you were a Toronto Raptors diehard, you probably had never heard of Jontay Porter.
So isn’t it a little weird that you could bet on his individual performance in an NBA game? Admit it, it’s a little weird.
It reminds me of coverage of NCAA scandals in the 2000 and 2010s, after the Ed O’Bannon case but before the NIL era. Stories covering individual violations without interrogating the larger structural issues felt incomplete.
And that’s what is happening in sports journalism with coverage of gambling. We’re excellent at covering the individual stories and scandals. But without coverage of the larger context, the overall coverage of this feels incomplete.