The NFL Wants Everyone on Earth to Gamble....Except For Their Players

This week, the NFL suspended 5 players (4 Detroit Lions and one Washington Commander) for betting on sports games. Lions wide receiver Quintez Cephus, safety C.J. Moore and Commanders defensive end Shaka Toney have been suspended indefinitely. They have to apply for reinstatement in a year and beg for their careers back.

Lions receivers, Jameson Williams and Stanley Berryhill will be suspended 6 games after being caught using mobile betting apps while in the team’s facility. It’s also reported that they didn’t bet on NFL games and I suppose that distinction matters to certain folk.

Cephus and Moore have already been cut by the Lions so it’s safe to say they won’t be playing in the NFL ever again. People’s lives were ruined all because they did what the NFL wants literally everyone on planet Earth to do: gamble.

I remember a few years back when New York State finally legalized sports betting. I don’t really gamble like that mainly because I’m poor and I have far worse vices to deal with but I never found sports gambling to be evil coupled with moderation just like alcohol and tobacco and all of the fun things.

But as more states legalized sports betting, there was a clear new wave of ads for mobile betting sites like DraftKings and FanDuel. Sports leagues like the NFL began major partnerships with many of these sites and they even moved the Raiders to Las Vegas just to make it obvious to everyone that they weren’t undercover cops and genuinely wanted football fans giving their hard-earned money over to sportsbooks.

It makes sense for the NFL to not want players betting.

A major sports league cannot sustain itself if there is a feeling that the players are not competing at the highest level. A league crumbles if it’s discovered that the outcomes of games have been fixed by the players participating in those games. I’m not going to spend money to see the Yankees play if I think Gerrit Cole is throwing balls into the dirt because he put a million dollars on their opponent or was pressured to do so by some outside force.

But it is impossible to watch an NFL game without being waterboarded with nonstop gambling ads. This league is making bajillions of dollars off these betting apps but if a player even dares bet on like, a NASCAR event, that player will be suspended like he pulled out a gun and murdered an opponent on 3rd down.

Seems gross.

Making Scrooge McDuck pools worth of money on gambling while not allowing any of your players to participate in gambling. That’s like, what drug dealers do. Like, the people responsible for the rise in prescription medication and the opioid crisis do not themselves, take opioids. Those people are evil. This is some real ‘never get high on your own supply’ type shit from the NFL office.

This is the same league that makes all of its money over the literal dead bodies of its player who sacrifice their physical and mental health for a fraction of the fortune the owners make. The NFL has refused to give health care to its former players and even pretended as if concussions weren’t a big deal to avoid paying out affected players and avoid letting the public know how truly dangerous their sport is.

Severely punishing people for participating in what you’re making boatloads of money off of is textbook unethical business. I understand that these rules are in place and the players are very silly to be caught gambling.

But to exclusively blame the players for breaking a rule without taking a step back to dissect that rule just makes you a cop. It’s the same bad-faith bullshit people were doing when Britney Griner was caught with weed in Russia or when Sha’Carri Richardson tested positive for weed in the Olympics. With all of the science and information we now have on marijuana, any law that prohibits it should be abolished.

Brutally punishing players for betting in arenas covered wall-to-wall with betting ads is wildly unethical. Jameson Williams will have to wear this scarlet letter for the remainder of his career and he wasn’t even betting on NFL games.

It would actually make more sense to allow the players to bet on other sports openly, that way it would be easier to track if a guy is trying to place a wager on NFL games or worse—bet on their own team to win or lose.

But by indefinitely suspending players and turning it into this massive taboo, you are encouraging players to be shady and secretive which could result in some really negative unintended consequences like guys fixing games.

Let players bet on sports as long as it’s not NFL games. There, problem solved.

Or if the NFL feels like allowing players to bet on other sports would open the floodgates for shenanigans then perhaps we need to all take a step back and treat gambling like we do cigarettes.

Sure, once you are of legal age you can buy and smoke all the tobacco your abused little heart can withstand by tobacco companies aren’t allowed to air ads for their products. In fact, they need to pay for all those quit smoking ads you see during reruns of Catfish on MTV. Draftkings and Fanduel shouldn’t have ads every 3 minutes but instead, they should be paying for anti-gambling advertisements.

The NFL is promoting heroin while simultaneously kicking players out of the league for doing heroin.

Free Jameson Williams (and the rest of them). Also, if any gambling site wants to give me a bag for advertisements, I will gladly sell out and delete this article.

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