By Joe Mock
This is an opinion piece on sports gambling, not a news article or ballpark review. This op-ed does not reflect the views of any publisher for whom I’ve ever written or ever will. These are my personal opinions.
The date was March 25, 2026. Netflix was airing its first-ever live baseball game. The pay network had ponied up a handsome sum to Major League Baseball for the rights to televise the first game of the regular season, a marquee matchup with the Giants hosting the Yankees at one of the sports’ true showplaces, Oracle Park.
When it came time for the first commercial of Netflix’s first baseball telecast, a spot rolled for Bet365.
Setting aside the question of why the viewer had to sit through commercials while also paying for the streaming service, one has to wonder if this choice of sponsor was a coincidence.
Considering that gambling services operate within the warm embrace of MLB – as well as the NBA, NFL and NHL – big-league execs certainly wouldn’t object to Bet365 as a sponsor. Sports books like FanDuel and Draft Kings have become the kind of advertiser on live sports that big pharma is for cable news. To say their ads are ubiquitous is an understatement.
I’m old enough to remember – and you are, too – when organized sports ran screaming from anything involving betting. Fantasy sports – originally called rotisserie leagues – were as far as pro sports would go. Occasionally you’d see articles with headlines like “Should playing in a fantasy league be considered gambling?” but for the most part, MLB and NFL didn’t mind it, and perhaps even encouraged it. But when it came to anything more immediate, like betting on the winner of today’s game, every pro league was steadfastly against it.
After all, they said, the integrity of the sport is at stake.
Now we’ve jetted to the opposite end of the spectrum. Gambling ads are everywhere, and to place a bet, you don’t even need a bookie. You just pick up your phone.
How did we get here? And more importantly, was legalizing all this a good idea?
Who said it?
So here are a few quotes. Can you guess who said each of them?
A. When asked if he would ever support wagering on games in his sport, he replied “It would make a mockery of the office I hold. There is absolutely no way Major League Baseball would ever participate in the kind of activity that is at the heart of your question.”
B. “Gambling on a sport … is, I think, the deadliest of all things that can happen. It’s evil, it creates doubt, and destroys your sport.”
C. Gambling on sports “exploits human weakness.”
D. When asked about how the NFL has embraced online gambling in recent years, he said “What are we doing to the brand? And when you bastardize the brand, you bastardize the culture.”
E. In a 2012 deposition, he warned: “If gambling is permitted freely on sporting events, normal incidents of the game such as bad snaps, dropped passes, turnovers, penalties, and play calling inevitably will fuel speculation, distrust, and accusations of point-shaving or game-fixing.” And in 2016, he stated emphatically “We remain very much opposed to gambling on sports … We want to make sure we’re doing what’s right for the game.”
F. In a speech, he spoke of “the insidious aspects of sports betting.”
“A” was said by former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent.
Another former commissioner, Bud Selig, said “B.”
Yet another MLB commish, Bart Giamatti, said “C.”
Former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said “D.”
Current NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said “E” before widespread sports wagering was made legal.
Before he became commissioner of the NHL, Gary Bettman said “F.”
So what changed?
Unlike a lot of societal ills, we can actually pinpoint the event that precipitated the dilemma we have today.
In May 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Professional and Amateur and Sports Protection Act of 1992 (that prohibited sports gambling in most states) was unconstitutional. This left it up to the states to decide whether gambling on sports would be legal. Several states, notably New Jersey, were ready to pull the trigger as soon as the ruling came down.
Soon state after state passed its own legislation, pushed heavily by lobbying efforts from casinos with sportsbooks in Las Vegas that wanted to expand, and two fairly small companies who dominated the fantasy-sports realm at the time: FanDuel and DraftKings.
Dozens more online sportsbooks sprang up – many going belly up just as quickly due to the high start-up costs – and by 2026, 30 states had legalized sports wagering.
So how big has it gotten?
A recent study shows that Americans gambled $167 billion legally on sports last year. That’s more than on movie tickets ($12 billion), books ($15 billion), tickets to live sporting events ($17 billion) and concerts ($95 billion) combined. This was such a shocking result that podcasters like Brodie Brazil and Tucker Carlson rushed to tell their viewers.
So we aren’t talking about insignificant sums.
This entire situation is described in a compelling way in a recently published book by Danny Funt. It’s called “Everybody Loses, the Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling.” I can’t recommend it highly enough. Let’s take a look at some of his findings, while weaving in plenty of my own.
Shameful roll call
While this is by no means an exhaustive list, you’d do well to be familiar with these names:
The Black Sox – Gambling on sports was rampant in the early part of the 20th Century, with the White Sox’ “fixing” the 1919 World Series the most infamous example. The eight dirty players were banned for life by MLB.
CCNY – They were the national champions of college basketball in 1950, long before today’s March Madness. The following season, three of their players were arrested and convicted of conspiring with gamblers to keep scores within the betting spread.
Paul Hornung – The “Golden Boy” running back of the Green Bay Packers was suspended for the entire 1963 season after he bet on games and associated with bookies.
Jontay Porter – At best, he was a bench player in the NBA, but he was a Hall of Famer when it came to finding ways to break the rules. He bet on games, leaked injury info to bettors and intentionally missed shots or faked injuries to help gamblers win prop bets on DraftKings. In 2024, the NBA banned him for life.
Pete Rose — Baseball’s all-time leader in hits isn’t in Cooperstown, because it’s another example of betting resulting in a lifetime ban (by the way, now that he’s dead, MLB has lifted the ban).
Calvin Ridley – The NFL suspended the Falcons’ wide receiver for the entire 2022 season after he was caught betting on football games. It cost him $11 million, his salary for that year.
Tucupita Marcano – In 2024, MLB banned the Pirates infielder for life after he was found to have bet $87,000 on baseball games, including on his own team.
Brad Bohannon – He was fired as head baseball coach at the University of Alabama for alerting a friend to bet against Bama that night because Bohannon intended to sit his star pitcher. This might not have been caught if the friend, Bert Neff, hadn’t gotten greedy and attempted to bet $100,000, while informing four other bettors to place similar wagers.
John “Hot Rod” Williams – He was arrested in 1985 for accepting drugs and perhaps money from gamblers to “shave” points off the scores of his Tulane college basketball team. Interestingly, the NBA permitted him to play in the league for 13 seasons. However, Tulane was so disgusted with the scandal they disbanded the entire basketball program for three years.
Toledo University football players – Similarly, players accepted gifts from gamblers to shave points from 2004 to 2006. Three players were arrested when the scheme was uncovered.
Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz – These two pitchers — with Clase being a three-time All Star — for the Cleveland Guardians were arrested and charged with accepting bribes from gamblers to alter their pitches in games, so those lowlife bettors could win prop bets. MLB suspended them indefinitely following their arrests.
Tim Donaghy – The veteran NBA ref bet on over 100 games that he officiated, doing so over four seasons before getting caught. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison. The mobsters and offshore gamblers who matched how he bet reportedly won hundreds of millions of dollars.
Brendan Sorsby – He’s perhaps the best-known college football player in 2026, for all of the wrong reasons, considering he never played a down. Starting his freshman year as a QB at Indiana University, he began betting on sports, including wagers involving his own team. By the time he’d been in college four years, he’d placed at least 4,000 bets, wagering over $90,000. Not only was this a clear violation of NCAA rules, he also broke the law by placing most of those bets when he was under 21. He wasn’t arrested for the latter, but the NCAA declared him ineligible, setting off one of the more bizarre series of events ever between Texas Tech, a friendly judge in Lubbock and the NCAA.
Amit Patel – He was sentenced to six years and six months in prison for wire fraud and embezzlement while working in the front office of the Jacksonville Jaguars. Yes, he was a horrid bettor, whose debts from gambling on sports (mostly through DraftKings and Fan Duel) hit $22 million. Unofficially, FanDuel suspects he lost more money than anyone in the site’s history.
Antonio Brown – Yes, we’re talking about the All Pro wide receiver who earned about $90 million from his NFL contracts. He filed for bankruptcy in 2024, partly due to his losses from gambling on NFL games after his retirement.
Ippei Mizuhara – He’s better known as Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter. Allegedly unbeknownst to Ohtani, his close friend had a bad addiction to sports gambling, mostly placing bets with an illegal bookie. From 2021 through early in 2024, he placed 19,000 wagers, losing $40 million dollars more than he won. He covered his debts by embezzling from Ohtani’s bank account, which he had access to. He was sentenced to Federal prison for 57 months, plus three years of supervised release, and he has to pay Ohtani back. If he ever can.
Yes, the above examples include problems arising from both legal and illegal gambling, but they all involved sports, and all were punished one way or the other. And these are just the ones who got caught or whose addiction became public. How many others broke their league’s rules by betting on or impacting games that we don’t know about?
Consider this
Does it even make sense to wager on sports?
Now, I have libertarian leanings, and I pretty much want people left alone to do what they want. But at some point, you have to wonder just how smart it is to take your hard-earned money and place a bet on your phone, and very possibly slide right into full-blown addiction. And what is the cost to society if you do?
So if you and a buddy bet ten bucks on the winner of today’s football game, the loser is out $10 and the winner walks away with $20. But that does not even begin to describe what happens when you bet with FanDuel and DraftKings.
With the money you’ve deposited on their sites, think about all of the entities with their hands out to grab a slice of your “winnings” if you’re lucky enough to place a successful wager:
- The sports books have to pay a licensing fee to operate in each state. These range from around $250,000 to Pennsylvania’s $10,000,000 (the first licenses granted by New York cost the books $25,000,000). Often there are fees to renew those licenses.
- The sports book has a “hold” calculated into their odds. FanDuel has said it averages 12% (but they told investors they want to work it up to 16% by 2030).
- Every state taxes the revenue of the book (gross revenue minus money paid out to winning bettors), ranging from 6.75% in Nevada to New York’s incomprehensible 51%.
- And the NBA and MLB pocket millions of dollars each year from sportsbooks for the dubious service known as “official data licensing” and the use of league and team logos.
And if you are foolish enough to put money on a “same game parlay,” the payoffs are significantly lower than the odds of hitting all of the components.
No wonder you’re unhappy that your payout is so low if you happen to “win.”
So why not spend a little money to learn the picks of “experts,” then place bets accordingly? Surely, you’d win big, right? After all, offshore bettors won huge sums by matching Tim Donaghy’s in-the-know betting choices.
Take the case of a company called Right Angle Sports. If there is such a thing, they are a respected pick-selling firm. They are especially highly regarded for their college basketball selections, yet during the 2023-24 men’s season, their picks won just 49.58% of the time.
Then there’s this: if you are actually in the 1% of the 1% who is simply brilliant at picking winners against the sportsbooks’ betting lines, the books are notorious for shutting down your account or drastically lowering the limit you’re allowed to bet once you’ve hit a big winner.
Funt interviewed Matthew Davidow, regarded as one of the smartest oddsmakers for football. “They’re just leading sheep to slaughter, in my opinion. The current situation is terrible for society. My issue isn’t that people are allowed to bet. It’s that the odds are terrible, so people’s chance to lose is way higher than it should be.”
He’d know.
Impact
There is an argument made by the pro-sports-gambling crowd that says that legalization has simply moved illegal betting into the light of day so it can be regulated and taxed. After all, you don’t want hitmen working for bookies breaking the legs of people with gambling debts.
So things are peachy now, right?
Wrong. Says Funt, “One researcher after another told me they believe the prevalence of gambling addiction is surging nationwide, fueled by the availability of legal sportsbooks and the ways their games are designed to keep customers engaged for as long as possible.”
Among those hooked on gambling, suicidal ideation occurs about half the time, way more than other forms of addiction. A New Jersey study found that among those who bet on sports – whether addicted or not – 21% admitted that there had been times when they wished they were dead.
It’s no surprise that depression and bankruptcy are common among those addicted to sports gambling … and get this: a study released by the Durham University (UK) Business School in March of this year found a marked increase in spouse (usually the wife) abuse when the (usually) husband suffers gambling losses. The report refers to these losses as “harmful gambling.” This leads to violence, financial collapse in the household and even homelessness.
And all of this has exploded since 2018. Thanks a lot, Supreme Court.
Michelle Malkin is the director of the East Carolina University Gambling Research & Policy Initiative. Funt provides her thoughts on how sports gamblers slip into addiction: “Your brain no longer thinks rationally; your dopamine, your serotonin – all your neurotransmitters – have been impacted by gambling. Nothing can replace that high.”
Plus you can’t escape the lures to gamble. In addition to the 24/7 advertising ($1.38 billion – or 23% of their revenues – spent by DraftKings alone last year), you are assaulted with utterly bogus promotions that assure you that your bet is “risk free” or you’ll get “bonus bets” if you lose (read their fine print to see what the reality is).
Plus you can aspire to become a “VIP” of the sportsbook, but understand that they only make losers VIPS, not those who win.
And what man can ignore a naked Sydney Sweeney, advertising sports betting on Novig?
Speaking of Novig, if you think you’re escaping all the foolishness of online sportsbooks by dealing with “prediction markets” like Kalshi, Polymarket and Underdog, you’re fooling yourself. They say they facilitate “event contracts,” and claim they aren’t subject to state gaming regulators like sportsbooks are, but New York State called bullcrap. The state filed lawsuits against Kalshi and Polymarket, alleging they “operate illegal, unlicensed gambling businesses in the state.” The damages and costs on Kalshi alone are estimated to be $36 billion.
Plus over 80% of Kalshi’s monthly haul of tens of millions of dollars is on sports. So don’t delude yourself that you aren’t really “gambling” when you’re placing a wager with Kalshi or Novig.
And the argument that legalized betting has simply replaced illegal activity is demonstrably false. A 2024 study concluded that legalizing bookmaking results in “sharp increases in sports betting.” A different report in 2024 found “a substantial increase in bankruptcy rates, debt collections, debt consolidation loans and auto loan delinquencies” because of legalized betting.
As a former exec at a sportsbook told Funt, “My job was to basically slowly bleed someone dry.”
And we’ve all read about the threats to the lives of athletes and their families when unhinged bettors lose.
But there’s also the temptation to athletes and refs to throw games. See The Black Sox, Tim Donaghy and Jontay Porter above. “That’s why I’ve called gambling an existential threat,” longtime sports agent Leigh Steinberg told Funt. “The amount of incidents that have occurred just in a short time frame ought to send a chill up the spine of everybody in a league office.”
Yet it falls on deaf ears. Says NBA commissioner Adam Silver, legalization is “good for the integrity of the game.” His point is that it makes it easier to monitor all gambling activity. He’s no doubt in favor of Flock cameras, too.
Legalization happened in a number of other countries earlier than in the U.S. That would make you think that we Americans can learn from the mistakes and consequences in these other places, but we seem to be totally oblivious. Betting on sports has been legal in Australia since the 1980s, with online betting arriving in the late 1990s, and Federal regulations going into effect in 2001. Today, about a third of all money wagered on sports there is from those considered to be addicted.
And what about all of that extra tax revenue being pocketed by U.S. states? Doesn’t that help fund orphanages and feed hungry children? As mentioned above, depression, bankruptcies and suicide skyrocket with easy access to sports gambling. “The public health costs could so overwhelmingly outweigh whatever revenue states generate from this, it’s just astounding,” says Patrick Moore, the first assistant attorney general for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
So it’s my conclusion that the societal costs and the hits to the integrity of sports make legalized sports betting a very bad idea. Did people place bets before the Supreme Court ruling in 2018? Sure, but making wagers on your phone caused an absolute explosion of bad outcomes – for the bettors, for the country and for sports themselves.
I love Funt’s conclusion in his book:
Prior to 2018, “at least things like protecting fans and maintaining integrity used to be aspirational. Now they seem up for sale. I called sports betting legalization a risky gamble, but I’m not sure that’s right: in a bet, the winners get back whatever they risked. Legalization is more like a trade-off: we know that as a result, more people will become addicted and more families will suffer; more people who work in sports will be harassed; more media outlets will be compelled to pull punches; more games will be compromised; more kids will take up gambling. And for what, exactly? Richer TV deals for the leagues? Profits for only a couple of companies? A more politically convenient revenue stream for states than raising taxes? If that’s all we stand to win, it will seem to me like an extraordinary price to have paid.”
To me, the evidence proves that legalized sports gambling is a bad bet.
Leave a comment below. Funt’s book is available on Amazon