Another week, another sports betting scandal.
It’s never been this easy for a player to fix the outcome of a bet. The onset of proposition or “prop” bets, in which gamblers can place wagers on specific outcomes in a game, has opened a Pandora’s box for athletic integrity. This month, the NCAA announced that a ring of college athletes had manipulated their performance in games to aid bettors and permanently revoked their eligibility. In October, the NBA faced its own seismic gambling indictments, more alleged prop rigging, complete with connections to the mafia. Now, the MLB is under scrutiny for a betting scandal of its own, with pitchers being accused of taking bribes in exchange for rigging pitches during a game.
Eight years after the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that had banned most states from legalizing sports betting, sports betting can feel like it’s embedded into every aspect of American sports culture. From bars to live broadcasts, online betting is changing how we consume sports. This is the age of the betting scandal — and the main suspect is that increasingly popular way to bet on games: prop bets.
Three takeaways on prop bets:
“It’s one of the defining traits of this legal online sports betting era,” Danny Funt, sportswriter and author of the upcoming book Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling, told Today, Explained guest host Astead Herndon. “One player can very easily influence the outcome of one of these prop bets. It’s literally about the play of a specific person, sometimes on a specific play.”
As scandals accumulate, leagues are cracking down. This week, the NFL sent a memo to team officials saying that gambling scandals in other sports have led the league to formulate policies to limit or prohibit prop bets in the NFL. The MLB announced that sportsbooks will establish a nationwide $200 betting limit on baseball wagers centered on individual pitches, in order to make them less susceptible to fixing.
Funt spoke with Herndon about the recent betting scandals, the rise of prop bets, and how they’re changing sports culture in America. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Can you give people a sense of just how granular some of these prop bets might get?
It’s ridiculous. What’s the speed of the next pitch? Will the runner on first try to steal second? Will this inning generate a run? Will a possession in football and then a score, a punt, or a turnover?
The idea is every second you’re watching and inevitably watching while on your phone, let’s give you something to bet on. In the past, you used to bet on who’s going to win or who’s going to win against the point spread. Now, the majority of people bet these prop bets on all sorts of kind of side propositions within a game like the speed of pitches and minutiae like that.
How have these prop bets popped up in the recent scandals in the MLB and NBA?
This same prosecutor’s office in New York City arrested Terry Rozier, who’s a guard on the Miami Heat. And they arrested Chauncey Billups, who was the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers.
Rozier was accused of feeding inside information to a close friend and some gamblers in their orbit and then removing himself from a game, saying he was injured because they had bet on the unders on his prop bets. So if I’m going to say Terry Rozier will score a certain number of points and then 10 minutes into the game, he removes himself. There was a good chance those bets were not going to go over. They bet the under a huge amount of money and allegedly divvied up the profits at Rogier’s house after one of these games. He was arrested, maintains his innocence,
So it seems as if a lot of scandals are deriving from these prop bets because of the individual impact that these players can have. Is this kind of betting new?
In the past, even if betting has always existed in Nevada or through your neighborhood bookie or whatever, typically that was done in person, often before games started. Now more than 90 percent of bets are placed online legally.
A lot of these are smartphone apps, which enable betting during games on these real-time bets. It creates so much opportunity for manipulation and this volume of betting where there are literally thousands of prop bets available for many major sports, every game, absolutely did not exist just several years ago. You could not bet tens of thousands of dollars on a fringe bench player to get a certain number of rebounds. That’s something new.
How much betting is happening on these prop bets during an individual game?
Americans wager about $150 billion legally every year. About 30 percent of the money wagered is on props or combinations of props that form parlay. That generates 60 percent of the revenue. More than half of the money generated is coming from this type of betting.
This opens the door for all sorts of corruption. Will the sports books be inclined to rein it in? I doubt it because it’s their biggest moneymaker these days. The thing that’s so enticing to these companies about offering thousands and thousands of live micro-bets during the game is you might bet 30 bucks pregame, but you might bet 10 bucks five or 10 times on these micro bets. Suddenly, you’ve bet way more than you would have if you were just doing it beforehand. So that’s why it’s a phenomenal business for them.
It’s also especially addictive because the more frenzied and relentless the bedding, the easier it is to feed that kind of compulsive instinct. Because if I’m betting every 10 seconds versus every two hours, it’s a very different experience.
Why exactly are these athletes, particularly active athletes, getting involved in these bets? We’re talking about multimillionaires.
That was literally one of the arguments that the leagues and their gambling operator partners assured the public when they were pushing for legalization was “don’t worry, today’s athletes are too wealthy to be corrupted.” They wouldn’t throw it all away to gamble.
Obviously, you could look in sports, you could look on Wall Street, whatever: Being rich doesn’t immunize you from being greedy or being foolish. That’s one thing. Hyper-competitive athletes may also be more susceptible to gambling addiction than the general population.
A ton of athletes gamble, and some of them get carried away. This idea that you make however many millions of dollars, so you’re not going to make a bad decision is really falling apart as we see these scandals unfold.
Is there any concern that the leagues have had about the ways that their close marriage to the sports betting industry has changed the viewing experience or changed the fan experience?
The commissioners of major sports warned decade after decade that all this stuff would happen. And then the people in power saw the dollar signs and changed their stance. But one of the things they really banged the drum on was that a fixation on betting cheapens or degrades your relationship with sports.
It’s one thing if you’re a diehard Chicago Bulls fan. It’s another thing if you go to a game and you’re just waiting for someone to get two steals. And sometimes nowadays, you can feel this in an arena or a stadium. You’ll hear like a groan or a cheer go out when someone grabs a rebound. And it’s like, what’s the big deal? What was that all about? It’s because they covered their prop betting line. So that stuff is interesting in how it’s changing the nature of fandom.
It also has a really ugly side, where of course sports fans can be overly intense and get crazed about the teams they’re rooting for, but we’re seeing a level of harassment and threats sent toward athletes that crosses a line. There have been stories of people being stalked at their team hotel or at their home. The manager of the San Diego Padres just resigned, and he said part of why he did it was I’m so tired of getting death threats from gamblers. So this is something that I think is gonna reach a boiling point.
What are people trying to do about prop betting? Are there any pushes to change the law or to roll back any of this?
One of the leading forces on that is the NCAA. They really dragged their feet to come around on legalization. They were often the most adamant that this would be bad for sports. And for a while now, they’ve been saying that states should ban bets on individual player props. Not only does it open the door for all sorts of manipulation and the temptation for them to gamble, it heightens that microscope that they’re under and leads to a lot of really ugly harassment that we were just talking about.
So some states have gone ahead and banned individual player props on college sports. The NCAA is pushing for all states to do that. Major League Baseball, in response to these arrests, reached an agreement with a bunch of sportsbooks that they won’t take bets exceeding $200 on individual pitches. At least from a fixing standpoint, it doesn’t make it as easy to make a boatload of money if you’re fixing certain pitches.
