DeMaurice F. Smith served nearly 15 years as executive director of the NFL Players Association and 10 years as a federal prosecutor. He is the author of “Turf Wars: The Fight for the Soul of America’s Game.”
This is an open letter to the commissioners, athletic directors and union leaders of sport.
Gambling in sports is a fast-moving crisis hiding in plain sight. The recent arrests and investigations are a harbinger of a larger existential crisis to come. What drives sport isn’t just the game; it’s the belief that the game — and the discrete actions within it — are authentic. That belief in the sanctity of sport is being threatened after recent events.
All of you have multiple and at times competing obligations: to preserve sport’s integrity, to protect and grow the business model and/or to protect and serve the players. However, all of you stand at a unique moment in time when your joint legacy will be either the “stewards” who protected American sport itself — or those who presided over its decline.
An early confession: I did several gambling deals on behalf of the NFL Players Association and negotiated how that revenue made its way into the shared pie of overall NFL revenue. I would do these deals again, because it is a false binary choice to say you must choose between all gambling deals — without limitation — or none of them.
Gambling is not just entertainment — but unchecked it’s a social contagion with lasting costs. My appeal to you is not based on this social cost but to eventual real harms: economic (and physical) to athletes, the business ecosystem, and sport itself — because, frankly, that is the only thing that moves the needle in this industry.
I have four professional lenses from which to view the coming problem: first as a federal prosecutor, then as a partner in one of America’s largest firms representing some of the biggest corporations and boards of directors, a law and business professor, and finally as the head of the NFL Players Association. I have worked through the “let’s make a deal” world of big business and learned as a prosecutor that when money moves faster than oversight, corruption, collateral consequences and unforeseen (yet enormous) business inevitably follow. That’s because the cultural and institutional norms that once served as governors erode more quickly than the same institutions can manage. Every large-scale political and financial scandal has had that as the root cause.
Let’s start with college sports. The NCAA recently made a decision to allow college athletes to bet on professional sports — then reversed its decision. Why was it made in the first place? So universities can mine gambling deals? So betting companies can recruit athletes as paid influencers? Was the plan that they be compensated in money — and/or gambling credits? Wouldn’t this likely increase the number of threats directed at professional and college athletes now that more people will link their performance to betting outcomes? Why wouldn’t every athlete view the NCAA’s ad, asking people to avoid bullying athletes, as hypocritical?
It isn’t as if we do not know the danger signs. A 2023 NCAA study found that sports wagering activity is widespread on college campuses: 67 percent of students living on campus are bettors and tend to bet at higher frequency; 41 percent have placed a bet on their school’s teams; 35 percent have used a student bookmaker; and 58 percent report being more likely to bet after seeing betting ads. The cynical side of me, hardened after years in this business, cannot help but think that these statistics are horrific to some and served as the basis of the earlier business decision for others.
The good news is that the NCAA reversed its decision and there is a glimmer that good leadership — recognizing a mistake and correcting it — is still out there somewhere. The bad news, of course, is that people at the largest sports governing body in America made the decision in the first place.
What is the lasting impact of a sports network that relentlessly promotes gambling while employing investigative reporters to uncover scandals, while promoting other reporters to report inside information all while being financially tied (some with ownership interests) to the sports they distribute and sell? (Editor’s note: The Athletic has a partnership with BetMGM.)
The networks and the leagues laughed it off for decades when a prominent sportscaster would close his coverage of a game with thinly veiled references to the score and the spread. We dismiss the drumbeat of conspiracy theories about referees and television coverage of skybox attendees and the Kansas City Chiefs. But in the era of mass gambling and the complicity of nearly everyone in this business, does anyone have the luxury of being that dismissive today?
Are we at the moment when a group of fans’ reaction to a missed shot, a dropped ball, or the mistakes that provide the chaos of March Madness will be to question the impact of the “over-under” or hundreds of prop bets that may not determine an outcome so much as reward someone because of a discrete act within the game? “Any Given Sunday” is the psychological driver for the fantastic business success of the NFL — even if you are a Browns fan. The erosion of that expectation is the threat you now all face.
Sport and its piggyback business models depend on public and consumer confidence. That confidence drives television deals, viewership, valuations and everyone’s salaries. Business leaders have known this for decades, which is why they invest heavily in quality control. When a restaurant chain faces contamination or a manufacturer issues a product recall, it affects a small percentage of consumers — the swift and comprehensive reaction by them is because they understand that even a relatively small mistake can damage the brand for decades. (Remember Chipotle? What do you think Campbell’s soup executives are thinking at the moment?)
Sports are no different. We’ve all just treated it as some impermeable exception until now. A recent poll by Quinnipiac University found that 33 percent of Americans think NBA coaches and players are either very often (12 percent) or somewhat often (21 percent) involved in illegal activities to influence betting on NBA games. Is this driven only by the recent scandal? Will this number dissipate? Who knows, but there is strong statistical research that once the damage is done, it becomes harder or impossible to undo.
The gambling industry operates by a different calculus. Their product is the bet itself — and now the discrete acts within the game, not just the game. They profit whether the outcome is fair or fixed, whether the athlete is healthy or exploited, whether the fan walks away satisfied or addicted.
And here’s the part that should alarm every person who loves sports: The gambling industry’s financial ecosystem is designed so that the house always wins — even when sport loses. This is not an indictment of gambling companies as much as it is just a recognition of two separate but inextricably intertwined business models. Both can win.
We stand at a crossroads. One path leads toward the preservation of the overall integrity of sport: the protection of athletes and the survival of it as something more than a betting platform. The other path leads toward a future where every play, every game, every season is increasingly perceived as a vehicle for wagering — where the question isn’t “Who won?” but “Who covered? Who was the big winner?”
I negotiated deals around gambling revenue in professional football, and perhaps I know too much about that ecosystem and the media companies involved in the promotion and consumption of the game. I believed — naively — that the guardrails would hold, that the countrywide cynicism toward institutions would not touch sport. That naivety about the strength of our institutions has been demolished over the last decade. One friend in the business recently said, “Why wouldn’t it happen to sport as well?” He is, of course, right.
The existential threat to the industry is based on the question of resilience. There was actually a time, not too long ago, when we believed that our national institutions were the gold standard strong enough to command trust and so sound that they were largely beyond question: voting integrity, a free press, the orderly post-election transfer of power, public trust in medical professionals, higher learning, the judiciary, and others. How little, and how long, did it take to erode the public trust? How much was based on verifiable evidence? It took just moments when juxtaposed against the imminent 250th anniversary of the country’s founding.
The evidence is now overwhelming that no institution, including the sports infrastructure, is impervious to an existential assault. Sport is especially susceptible because the existing conflicts of interest are deep, ingrained and perpetual, since they have co-opted organizations designed for accountability. The money has moved too fast. The lifeline that it has provided to networks and perhaps, in the future, college athletic budgets is too compelling to resist. The cultural norms that once treated gambling as a vice to be carefully managed have evaporated in the rush to monetize every snap, every pitch, every shot. Again, while that is capitalism for some business actors, it should not be the dominant motivation for others with higher duties. I do not envy your positions as you respond to the clamor for more ancillary revenue and the players within these systems are not without fault as well.
So, I say this to the leaders who will make the next set of decisions about gambling and sport: You must choose wisely with a clear eye on the long road ahead. There is a tension between your inviolate duty to the integrity of the game and the insatiable appetite of an industry that wishes to exploit it. You cannot ultimately protect athletes while compensating — without guardrails — the very forces that put them at risk. You cannot preserve the authenticity of competition while embedding it ever deeper into systems designed to commodify every moment of it.
The question isn’t whether gambling and sports can coexist. They already do. The question is whether these leagues can survive as sport — as something authentic, competitive and worthy of our investment of time, money and emotion — or whether it will be consumed entirely by the thing we invited in to help fund parts of it.
Before we destroy what makes sport both sacred and profitable, here is what should happen:
Create an internal commission on the integrity of sport that cuts across leagues and college athletics.
Leagues, universities, unions and others should confront the existential threats to the business. Money will drive more action than altruism, but it must be guided by purpose. This cannot be another weekend panel discussion that never produces systemic change. Rather, commissioners, athletic directors and sports unions need to have one discussion about preserving the sanctity of sport and then produce written agreements on both the threats and the critical steps, duties and compliance measures necessary to do so. They should agree on their own disciplinary measures (as leagues and unions do for players but oddly not management). That is likely more palatable than leaving it to legislative bodies that govern antitrust exemptions, taxation rules and stadium measures. Lawyers, doctors and financial professionals face disbarment and decertification from their credentialing bodies for a reason: It incentivizes good behavior regardless of the monetary outcome. There is no such mechanism in the multi-billion-dollar industry of sport — and there should be.
Impose and publicize firewalls (that should exist) inside media organizations, leagues and teams to protect material nonpublic information in the same manner as financial and legal institutions.
There is currently no culture of safeguarding such information in sport, where “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying” is still the mantra. There was a time when you could simply shrug off the fact that the sports industry is not a financial institution. I know, first hand, that the custodians of this information in sport do not treat it like we treated information at my law firms or when I was a prosecutor. This is likely the one place where increased education and the imposition of rules will have the greatest impact.
You are the stewards of games that shape culture, identity and belief — not just revenue. An unchecked, unexamined and ungoverned business model will create more problems than any future leader can fix. Worse, it will destroy something we all love.
I know which side of that equation I’m on. I just hope enough people in positions of authority figure it out before there is nothing left worth betting on.
