When the Supreme Court legalized sports gambling in 2018, the N.F.L. rushed to embrace a lucrative line of business it had denounced for decades as bad for the sport. There was, after all, new money to be made. The consequences of that about-face are now coming due.
The league on Friday handed down some of the strictest penalties it has ever issued, banning three players for at least the 2023 season for betting on N.F.L. games and suspending two others for six games for other violations of the league’s betting policy. The scale of the latest scandal and the terse verdict from the league rekindles questions about the precarious line the N.F.L. is trying to walk on gambling.
The indefinite suspension of three players — receiver Quintez Cephus and safety C.J. Moore of the Detroit Lions and defensive end Shaka Toney of the Washington Commanders — means that five players in the last four years have received at least season-long bans for betting on N.F.L. games, after decades without any such punishments. This week’s investigation ended with two more Lions players, receivers Stanley Berryhill and Jameson Williams, suspended for six games for lesser gambling violations that did not include betting on N.F.L. games.
This kind of scandal may have been what the N.F.L. was guarding against during the 25 years it spent inveighing against legalized sports betting. “We should not gamble with our children’s heroes,” Paul Tagliabue, then the league’s commissioner, testified to Congress in 1991 in support of legislation that effectively banned sports betting nationwide. In 2012, it was Roger Goodell’s turn to take up the cause.
N.F.L. Walks a Fine Line on Players’ Betting
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