Among those arrested in a sprawling FBI investigation was NBA player Terry Rozier, accused of tipping bettors about a game he played in. It comes at a time when sports betting has reached an all-time high in the U.S.
Players gambling
Rozier allegedly tipped off bettors that he would leave a game early due to injury on March 23, 2023, while he played for the Charlotte Hornets. Rozier allegedly received $200,000 for that tip.
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Rozier is making $24 million this year and has made more than $160 million in his NBA career.
“Stupidity knows no monetary bounds,” Jonathan Cohen, author of “Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling,” told Straight Arrow News.
“All it takes is one or two athletes to get greedy to have an incident like this,” Cohen said.
Rozier is far from the first athlete to find themselves in the middle of a gambling scandal. Eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of conspiring with gamblers to throw games in the 1919 World Series, earning them the infamous “Black Sox” nickname.
The 1951 college basketball point shaving scandal landed dozens of players in hot water.
Arguably the most famous gambling incident is Pete Rose’s 1989 agreement to a lifetime ban for betting on baseball.
Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani recently found himself immersed in a gambling scandal in which his interpreter was convicted of stealing money from Ohtani to bet.
“We’re going to keep having scandals like this,” Cohen said. “It’s just a matter of how much is too much. How much the public is willing to take before we really have a blowback on the whole sports betting infrastructure.”
Sports betting legality
Sports betting remains legalized across the country. Currently, 39 states allow sports betting either online or in retail.
The industry posted a record $13.7 billion in revenue last year. That large number will increase substantially if sports betting ever becomes legalized in high-population states like California and Texas.
“California is like the golden goose,” Cohen said. “The industry is going to double in size once California and Texas legalize.”
At the earliest, Texas would legalize sports betting in 2027, but that’s an uphill battle, according to some Republicans in the state.
Then there are some states where it’s highly unlikely.
“Utah is never,” Cohen said. “As long as my three-year-old’s grandchildren are alive, they are never going to legalize it. They don’t even have a lottery.”
The big players in the online betting space are DraftKings and FanDuel, who control 77% of the market.
“Then there are a couple other smaller companies around the fringes, and many of them are well-known casino properties in places like Las Vegas,” Cohen said.
Other sports betting avenues
For states like California and Texas, there are several ways to get around those laws and find a way to care about Saturday’s UMass v. Central Michigan game. For what it’s worth, Central Michigan is favored by 15.5 points.
One is to simply find a bookie and place illegal bets.
Ohtani plays in California, and that’s exactly what his translator, Ippei Mizuhara, did before landing in prison.
For those who want to wager without risking prison time, there are other options.
One is a recent entrant to the market called prediction markets, like Kalshi and Polymarket.
“[Those] are places normally for betting on things like elections, but over the last few months, have basically become sports books themselves,” Cohen said. “And they’re perfectly legal in places like California and Texas.”
Then there are companies like PrizePicks and Underdog. They are considered daily fantasy sports games and thus legal in states where sports betting isn’t.
“It’s basically sports betting in disguise,” Cohen said. “But you’re betting on individual player performances rather than team performances, and there’s some other sort of niches to it.”
Sports leagues embrace gambling
While the NBA has cracked down on players caught gambling, like Jontay Porter, that hasn’t stopped the league from cashing in.
“I think in the modern digital era, the choice is between legalized sports betting or illegal sports betting,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said on ESPN on Tuesday. “Not ‘do you want sports betting or not?’”
Silver said that allows his league to monitor gambling.
“With this regulated structure of legalized betting, we can monitor it in ways that were unimaginable years ago,” Silver continued.
However, Rozier’s alleged point shaving happened in 2023, and the FBI bust just took place.
Cohen called Silver’s comments “total bullsh-t.”
“If your system is so good, why did it take two years for the FBI to catch these people?” Cohen said. “Especially when the NBA already conducted its own investigation of Terry Rozier, and by all accounts, cleared him of any wrongdoing.”
It’s not just the NBA. Major League Baseball announced an expanded relationship with DraftKings in 2021, and the National Football League has a partnership with both DraftKings and FanDuel.
“It sure seems like evidence of hypocrisy,” Cohen said. “The league and its media partners and the sports gambling companies try to extract as much money from the gambling economy as they can and then pretend that they can have no negative externalities. Pretending that there’s never going to be any problems that result from it.”
Sports broadcasters embrace gambling
As Cohen said, the media partners are a big part of it as well.
For those who enjoy watching sports, there’s little chance you missed a commercial for some type of sports betting app. If you haven’t, then you’ve likely seen one of the big players sponsoring a segment during the game.
ESPN, for example, includes betting odds on almost every game preview on its website, and it’s commonplace for sports networks to host full shows just to look at betting odds.
“I see it as a problem for the children who are watching these games and are being fed gambling material without context and without understanding that gambling addiction exists,” Cohen said.
