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Breaking gambling’s grip on the Super Bowl

Allegations of game-fixing in the NFL won’t help the league in its embrace of legal sports gambling.

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AP/file
A gambler makes a sports bet at a casino in Atlantic City N.J., in 2019.
  • By the Monitor's Editorial Board

A new course at the University of New Haven offers this promise to students: “We’re going to train you to protect the sports that you love.” Designed to provide tools and skills for people to spot corruption in sports, the course is well timed.

With gambling on sports now legal in 30 states since a 2018 Supreme Court ruling, this year’s Super Bowl is expected to set a record for the number of Americans wagering on the championship game. Total spending on bets is estimated to be unprecedented $7.6 billion. And along with these records are rising concerns that gambling on pro football will, as NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell once put it, “fuel speculation, distrust, and accusations of point-shaving or game-fixing.”

The National Football League is already under a cloud of suspicion over how it maintains the integrity of its games – even as it partners with the gambling industry. This month, former Miami coach Brian Flores alleged in a lawsuit that the Dolphins team owner offered him $100,000 per game in 2019 to intentionally lose in order to improve the team’s ability to draft better players. That charge was followed by a similar complaint against the Cleveland Browns by former coach Hue Jackson.

If the allegations are proved to be true, football fans might begin to doubt the league’s official data – which is used widely by gamblers. While most pro sports have set up systems to watch for match-fixing and betting irregularities, the rapid increase in legal sports gambling will test those systems.

“The NFL has always prided itself in ‘Every game matters, no matter what.’ OK, and now all of a sudden, it looks like that’s not quite true,” Richard McGowan, a Boston College associate professor, told The Boston Globe.

Cheating scandals in athletic competitions, from bribing of players to doping, have rocked many sports worldwide. Yet they need not prevent sports from returning to the purity of their ideals. Athletics, writes Michael Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard University, must “fit with the excellences essential to the sport.” Rules for sport must make sure sports do not “fade into spectacle, a course of amusement rather than a subject of appreciation.”

For sports fans, such appreciation can include joining together to safeguard a sport. There’s now even a university course in how to do that.

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