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Beware: If you think you know all the pitfalls of mixing gambling with sports, you don’t

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2 weeks ago

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It wasn’t enough for the major professional sports to allow and support gambling.

There are sports books at stadiums and you can bet on almost anything. It’s not just a conventional win/lose line, maybe over/under.

Now, there are proposition bets for individual player statistics.

Track Bellevue’s Wyatt Sumser turned into jumps ‘beast’

Jontay Porter was banned from the NBA for disclosing confidential information to gamblers, limiting his own participation for betting purposes and betting on games himself. He removed himself from a game so bettors would win on a prop bet he wouldn’t make a 3-pointer.

Prop bets? Instead, Porter was a prop.

He was a pawn/toy for a puppet master who might not have known a thing about basketball.

Look how close MLB international superstar Shohei Ohtani was to a gambler with access to everything. Ohtani, who plays for the Los Angeles Angels, was cleared of wrongdoing, but influence and information don’t even have to pretend they’re in shadows now.

MLB recently banned San Diego Padres’ Tucupita Marcano for betting (and rarely winning), including wagers on his own team (Pittsburgh). These are integrity land mines, wait until a scandal is nuclear.

Tennessee Titans receiver Calvin Ridley was suspended by the NFL for one season while with Atlanta Falcons. He bet on NFL games while taking a season off to focus on his mental health.

Sports and gambling aren’t friends and they aren’t great partners, especially with social media. Gambling is always waiting to hurt sports, but we won’t know the unforeseen consequences until they smack us in the face in years to come.

It doesn’t make gambling or gamblers wrong. Gambling on sports is a fun/unique adrenaline rush.

That doesn’t mean the bunch negates the bad apples. Players often deal with gambling spectators and on social media — or sometimes on their own porches — including threats because the player’s performance didn’t meet a prop bet.

It’s not a fantasy, contrary to the football namesake for another parallel realm rife with scourges assaulting players with critical discourse. NFL players love to hear that they should die because they failed to catch the touchdown that would have beat the lineup of somebody’s uncle.

They can’t wait to hear about how a goal, bucket or hit that didn’t happen cost a gambler a chance at a parlay, and thus should result in the stabbing of the player’s child or wife or mother.

There are 17 games in the NFL regular season. There are 145 chances more than that for gamblers to get angry and make MLB players uncomfortable.

So, no more prop bets, that’s enough of that? Oh, no. Nuh-ho.

Not when people are spending money.

Still, it seems weak, volatile and counterproductive to support that source of revenue. They’re connected to individual players who either helped them or hurt them, instead of a team or sport or big picture.

Further, you can win a bet, but your team lost the game. If you win when you lose, that’s not sports as we’ve known.

There have always been scapegoats for those who bet on games, but prop bets simply create more opportunities for more players to disappoint. That leads to exponentially more negative feedback, which doesn’t have to be tolerated.

You win and lose as a team. You shouldn’t have to fight individual battles because gamblers were afforded the chance to use you for financial gain.

Especially if some of them threaten and insult players.

That’s gambling. People have always paid attention to what individual players do, but team sports used to be about team wins.

We things. Us initiatives. There wasn’t another way to win.

That worked for me, but it’s not good enough for our society.

The score is often irrelevant for most gamblers. How can a game not be about the score?

Doing it together, and the bonds that develop, are the fabric of the strongest teams. By definition.

Yet, wins continue to be devalued by analysts. Ask the players – any position – if wins are important.

Whose game is it? Which isn’t to say there aren’t already players who no longer care who won if they played well.

We’re teaching them to separate themselves from the team. You’re ruining some of my favorite things and the ramifications of a new model might lead to changes you didn’t want either.

We should probably slow down with all of this. But gambling and analytics coincide and coexist as perfect fits. The games are broken down too much for fans of the games.

If you compartmentalize too much, it isn’t about what happens in the end. That’s not sports as we used to enjoy them.

Please stop the madness. Betting on events within a game would seem to diminish/deemphasize the true goal. You have the games, old-school style, and you have the ‘game’ now.

It was assumed they could coexist for the sake of greed. Maybe they can’t?

How about a few betting options for gamblers, rather than any option? We all knew the cat would go nuts if it got out of the bag.

Bets dependent on one person in a team game? Of course that’s a bad idea.

People are engaged to one person, or one person at a time at best. Are we sure that’s even a entryway to team sports?

We can be certain it’s a door to more money. If you watch team sports, you’re incessantly bombarded by advertisements for gambling books.

And it constantly becomes more individualized. Personal team sports, call it.

There are too many reasons that sounds bad. If they tried to market that, people would suggest they’d lost their way.

Wouldn’t they?

mhorn@gannett.com

419-307-4892

X: @MatthewHornNH

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