Gambling Suspensions Expose NFL’s Absurd and Crooked Reality Show

Players were going to bet on games, and the owners have only themselves to blame, along with their lust for money.

How utterly despicable this whole thing is. Predictable, too. The NFL waited until we’re all on the road for Fourth of July weekend to tell us what we already knew: Their idiotic, money-grubbing relationship with a fleet of sportsbooks has turned up three more players who placed bets on NFL games and, because of that, were suspended indefinitely Thursday.

I care far less about the gravity of these year-long suspensions than the fact that the NFL doesn’t even feel like a sport anymore. As wonderful as it is to sit back on some weekends and see people display the peaks of their athleticism and talent, they are an opening act to this absurd and crooked reality show constructed by this pack of mosquitoes intent on sucking every bit of life from America’s game.

Every major NFL headline over the past two decades has been nothing more than the direct result of some unforeseen side effect of irresponsible, avaricious growth. Of course players were going to bet on football games. Gambling is addictive. A gambling company’s ability to make its product more addictive is directly related to the platform they were handed when NFL commissioner Roger Goodell invited them all into his bedroom. Explain the nuances of these absolutely labyrinthine rules, dictating when and where and how players are supposed to bet? Nah. Instead, let’s pop these players for a suspension so we have something to leak to our NFL insiders on our fledgling television network. All attention, after all, is good attention. Once those crooks figured it out, there was no turning back.

The NFL suspended three more players indefinitely Thursday for gambling on league games.  :: Stephen Lew/USA TODAY Sports

Drug-test results, concussions, issues of race, competitive integrity, issues of post-career decline (both cognitive and physical), issues of what the hell their own rules mean and how to actually enforce them, they are all boiling over. Constantly. Perpetually. Never once has there been more than a half-hearted attempt at assuaging us that all is well while the vessel barrels onward. What a truly American story this is. Our current reality with legalized gambling throughout a growing number of states across the country is in only its nascent stages, and we’ve already lost seven players for a season at the height of their ability.

The NFL doesn’t care that the integrity of its sport has been shot to hell because it’s the league’s own name on the gun permit. It owns the bullets and the morgue, too. I’ll never see a dropped pass in a game again without wondering whether there was some FanDuel account getting padded somewhere, and you shouldn’t, either. Every new sponsor, every new revenue stream—just wait for them to clamor for foreign entities taking on minority ownership stakes but tell you all how much they love America—is creating another issue that takes away from the sanctity of the sport. It’s creating another subgenre of problems that they will ultimately make someone else’s problems and then cash in on the publicizing of that process.

In case you care, and I’m sure this is the one paragraph the NFL hopes you’ll read, the names of the suspended we found out about Thursday are Isaiah Rodgers and Rashod Berry of the Colts and free agent Demetrius Taylor. While it’s impossible to know for sure, the details of their crimes seem to have been conveniently tucked away until this very moment. They bet on NFL games. Nicholas Petit-Frere of the Titans said on Thursday that he was suspended six games for betting on other sports at a team facility.

I’m sure there is some football coach spending the Fourth of July weekend away from their family to try to figure out how their myriad schemes will have to operate without these people. I’m sure the NFL doesn’t care and I’m fairly certain that you’ve been conditioned to not really care about that, either. That’s because you have come to expect the reality show. You have been conditioned in its various mechanisms. You are now what I was as a middle-schooler sitting, with rapt attention, in front of World Wrestling Entertainment. On any given day, I couldn’t tell you who was winning belts, but I could outline all of the Machiavellian politics, who was cheating whom, who was pulling the strings behind the velvet curtain. When was the last time you sat down with a friend or relative to talk football and actually discussed … football? When was the last time you watched Dance Moms to see dance? When was the last time you watched Jersey Shore to see the ocean?

Eventually that all became tiresome, and maybe that is our only hope of snapping this league back into an actual facilitator of our favorite sport and surrounding it with the kinds of resources that can help it grow and flourish; that you, too, will become tired of it all. I’ve talked to people who gave up on the NFL after Deflategate, after concussion-gate, after Kaepernick, after Trump, after they couldn’t tell us what a catch was, after they evaporated a defensive player’s resources so they could juke the fantasy football product. And while it’s hard for me to explain at the moment, I’m wondering whether we can all see it now: These are the same problems. This is a spaceship controlled by politically charged, status-obsessed, golden-toilet billionaires, and we are at their complete and total whim. They have monetized the side effects and, thus, care not what they are. Our only choice is how far we want to stay on this ride into the unknown.