We haven’t seen the worst of sports betting yet, and that should concern the feds

When I was a kid, the Pete Rose scandal was all over the news. How could this guy who embodied baseball bet on games?

We talked about it in class and one kid made an excuse that many Americans have made then and even now about Rose: “He may have bet on baseball, but he never bet against the Reds.” That has been trumpeted by Rose supporters, even after his death.

In the wake of the NBA betting scandal that shocked the sports world last week, I had to revisit that excuse for Rose. No, I am not trying to smear the dead. But Rose, Chauncey Billups, Terry Rozier and others looped into sports betting all face the same temptation. It is much easier to bet on yourself to lose than it is to bet on yourself to win.

When you play poker with your friends, you always bet on yourself to win. That’s the point of the game — and it's the thrill you get from taking your friends' money.

When you go into a casino, you don’t go in with the mindset that you want the house to win. You know that the house always wins, but you want to luck your way into proving that old adage wrong. You bet with your buddies that you can make a basketball shot, get the highest grade on a test, jump the highest, run the fastest, or whatever you want to compete on.

But it's different for professional sports athletes.

NBA legend Charles Barkley got into a spat with his “Inside the NBA” co-host Kenny Smith about the recent scandal. Smith tried to explain away the reasoning for players and coaches engaging in this behavior as a gambling addiction. Barkley said it was “stupidity.” The truth is that the direct motive for the gambling doesn’t matter. The underlying reason is always the same: It’s profitable.

You cannot control whether you succeed, but you can definitely control whether you fail. And that is what sports gambling opens the door to. It incentivizes athletes to fail. It is hard to knock out an opponent, but it is easy to get knocked out. It is hard to hit a home run but easy to strike out. It is hard to stop a hockey puck, but it is easy to let one by you.

And don’t get me started on field goals in football.

When sports betting was legalized, the government was eager to regulate it based on how much money it could take in. But lawmakers and bureaucrats cannot eradicate the temptation for athletes to fix the outcome for gamblers.

Anyone who has bet on sports recently knows that you aren’t just betting on wins and losses, covering points, or getting the over or under. There are thousands of prop bets each week across all sports, which focus on individuals achieving or failing to achieve any number of goals.

You cannot play a certain number of minutes, miss a set amount of shots, have a certain number of turnovers, or fail in any other number of ways. These prop bets are money-makers, as they give sports books more action to bet on and make more money.

A simple Google search for prop bets on the Sunday morning of this writing found one of the centerpieces of American sports journalism running an article on which NBA prop bets are the best for that day. ESPN has its own sports book. The NBA embraced sports betting partnerships. Even the venerable “Inside the NBA” crew of Barkley, Smith, Shaquille O’Neal, and Ernie Johnson would talk about betting lines in their famous pregame show. And when there is money to be made off an athlete, an athlete wonders how they can also make money.

Many have wondered why athletes who make millions would bet to make just a few dollars more. Well, you can never be too rich. Easy money is dumb to turn down.

And when you are not the highest-paid athlete, the allure of making money by failing gets stronger.

Let's look at college football. We are in an age when players can make name, image and likeness money and enter transfer portals. We can now talk about how crazy it is that the transfer portal (the college equivalent of free agency) is happening while the season is still going on, and that there are no regulations that prohibit tampering.

A running back at State U might get a call from a booster at U of State offering a lot of money to switch colleges. If State U is in the playoffs, do you really trust that running back to try to win, or to protect himself for a bigger paycheck next season at the other school?

Now add prop bets to the equation. In a dormitory on campus, there is probably an impoverished kicker watching his quarterback, running back and wide receivers get paid handsomely. The team, highly ranked goes up against its rival. The kicker looks on his phone and realizes there is a lot of money to be made if he misses a key field goal. His teammates will still get paid, but now he will too.

And if he isn’t already motivated to fail, there are many, many nefarious individuals who might persuade him.

We all got caught up in the story that the Five Families of the New York Mafia were involved in these scams. But as anyone who has paid attention lately knows, bettors have repeatedly accosted pro and college athletes after losing money on them. Who's to say that an extortion threat or blackmail attempt won’t play some part in this?

It was this belief that led sports organizations to their zero-tolerance policy toward bettors. A mere association with an admitted gambler caused George Steinbrenner, the late owner of the New York Yankees, to be banned from baseball in 1990. (This was later overturned.) Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were each punished for taking jobs with casinos. Everyone on the infamous Black Sox team involved in fixing the 1919 World Series was banned for life. There was a time when the mere thought that you might associate with gamblers could end your career.

We haven’t even come close to the tip of the iceberg when it comes to betting scandals. There needs to be tighter regulation — not just on how much money the government can make off sports betting, but on what type of bets that people can make to begin with. Fair play and integrity are at risk. The last thing you need is people deluding themselves that players would never bet against themselves, even if the money line says they should.

Jos Joseph is a recipient of the Military Reporters and Editors award for Best Commentary/Opinion. He is a graduate of Harvard University and Ohio State University. He is also a Marine veteran who served in Iraq. He currently lives in Anaheim, Calif.