The Gambling Gamble

Can the NFL, NBA and MLB do dirt and stay clean of scandal?

Sports betting can be tricky. For instance, I was pretty certain the Warriors would lose Game 3 without Draymond Green and instead, they blew out the Kings. This sports result, on the other hand, I found to be far more predictable than NBA playoff games.

The NFL has to come down hard on these guys, even if they didn’t bet NFL games, because it’s their only hope of holding the line here. As pro sports attempts to frack the pie with a massive promotion of increasingly legalized gambling, it’s facing the tricky problem once articulated by 1990s Bay Area rapper Celly Cel: “How you figure you can do dirt and stay clean?” The answer, most likely, is that you can’t.

In trying to figure out a chaotic world, I look to some simple heuristics. This is why I run big organizational policies through the filter of what I’m calling “How Did That Workoutism?” As in, did a policy work? Did it make people healthier or happier? This is one way to judge major reforms, with the concession that sometimes the answers to those questions are up for debate. In the case of legalized sports gambling, I drift every day towards the sense that it’s going to fail the How Did That Work Out test for society and maybe even for the sports themselves.