The NFL prohibits all non-players from betting on sports. Players, for reasons neither obvious nor apparent, are permitted to legally wager on non-NFL games and events.
Here’s another reason why they shouldn’t be .
Per a league source with knowledge of the situation, one NFL player lost $8 million last through gambling in 2022.
Again, the NFL fully controls the gambling policy, with no input from the NFL Players Association. And the league inexplicably has decided to let players legally bet on sports, even though non-players cannot.
Chris Simms’s theory, as expressed during Tuesday’s PFT Live, is that the league lets players legally bet so that the sports books can make money from young guys with lots of cash to burn. The fact that one player lost $8 million last year tends to bolster what otherwise could be dismissed as the musings of a Howie Roseman top-five conspiracy theorist.
How much money are others players betting? How much money are all players losing?
The reality is that the house ALWAYS wins, over the long haul. The house hopes that you become sufficiently emboldened by short-term success to believe that you’ve stumbled onto a system, or something. That you’re going to keep winning and winning and winning.
You won’t. You’ll lose. They win. You lose.
My dad, whose crew inspired Father of Mine , was a bookie. I never bet because he shared with me at a young age this simple, three-word lesson: You. Can’t. Win.
So, again, why let the players wager on sports during their NFL careers? The Commissioner giveth, and the Commissioner can taketh away. The problem is that, if the rule were to change to prohibit all forms of sports betting by players, he’d be taking away plenty of money from the sports book partners that give plenty of money to the NFL.