I am the most degenerate gambler of them all. There is absolutely no better feeling than cashing a 5 or 6 leg parlay you have been sweating all fucking day, or cashing a 3 leg same game parlay with props and overs, and for the love of god when you have a Saturday or Sunday where every over hits it is the absolute dream scenario. I will always advocate for letting grown ass adults do whatever the hell they want and if they want to gamble some old suits on capitol hill shouldn’t be able to tell me no. But it does raise an interesting problem with the gladiators in the arena who shouldn’t be fixing games - because I’ll tell you this if it comes out that all these sports games are getting fixed to line Vegas’ pocket books or the execs or whoever the hell else I’m going to lose my mind.

But not only is gambling allowed now in over 30 states but the NFL takes money straight from these sports books and has since the second they could in 2019. They have had multiple sportsbooks official sponsors from the moment they could and immediately started pushing as much of their content as they could. Every single Sunday it is impossible to not know the over, under, spread, and moneylines odds of every single game in the NFL. Now, again, I appreciate it as a gambler but I think we can all agree that they push gambling more than Apple tried to push that U2 album on all of us when we got the iPhone 6.

Since 2019 when the US lifted the heavily restricting sports gambling bans there have been countless scandals - not just in the NFL - but in all major and collegiate sports regarding players betting while playing a professional sport. In the same year that the NFL got their first sports gambling sponsorship the NFL suspended Josh Shaw indefinitely for betting on the Cardinals who he was playing for at the time. Since then eleven players and one coach have received punishment from the league for violating the league’s gambling policy in less than 10 years. Now, I’m not good at math and statistics but that doesn’t seem very good if you ask me. However, the bigger problem to me seems the now rich college landscape with NIL.

Who has every single Sunday off and studies the game of football at the highest level besides professionals? That’s right college players. These are kids fresh from high school seeing more money than they have ever seen in their life - some are literally getting millions and millions of dollars. Now if you gave an eighteen year old me a million dollars I know I am not making the best financial for myself and yet we expect these kids who are under a microscope to just… behave perfectly and invest all their money in the S&P 500? It’s a ridiculous thing to even consider.

The reason I started writing this blog is obviously because of the whole Brendan Sorsby controversy that has been the big headline of this offseason. Now, I don’t believe that college or professional athletes should be able to bet on their own games but when are we going to stop putting the blame on them and start blaming the people that actually are causing this epidemic, the executives and owners of the leagues themselves? The players are getting subjected to all of this amazing perfectly executed marketing and then expected to ignore it and never touch it. It’s a ridiculous standard to hold these kids to. It’s like America being surprised that there was an entire generation of smokers when all the ads were doctors saying that they preferred a certain cigarette brand over another one. I think it’s an absolute joke that the league denied Sorsby’s application to the supplemental draft because it just keeps showing that the NFL and Roger Goodell is one of the most hypocritical entities to exist in the modern era. Roger Goodell is an absolute joke of a commissioner and this is another data point adding to that argument.