Gamblers would give anything to peek at Ian Rapoportâs notes. In late April, Rapoportâa reporter at the NFL Network, known on air as an âinsiderââwas sitting on a scoop about the draftâs most intriguing story line. Until then, it had been considered a done deal that the San Francisco 49ers would select an Alabama quarterback named Mac Jones with the third overall pick; bettors, expected to risk tens of millions of dollars on the draft, were counting on it. But Rapoportâs sources told him that the 49ers were seriously considering Trey Lance, a quarterback from North Dakota State otherwise thought to be a long shot for the top five. Landing the story placed Rapoport in a devilish dilemma, one that sports journalists now confront often: publish the news and send sportsbooks scrambling to update their odds, or wait a few seconds, place a bet first, and give himself a good shot at winning a small fortune. âItâs kind of like insider trading,â he said.
Rapoport listened to the angel on his shoulder. He went straight to Twitter. âMy tweet went crazy,â Rapoport told me. Someone whoâd bet a hundred dollars on San Francisco to take Lance a few weeks earlier stood to profit fifteen hundred dollars; after Rapoportâs report, the odds swung dramatically. (In sports betting, odds are fixed the moment a bet is placed, no matter what news comes to light after the fact.) Four days later, when Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, took the stage to announce that San Francisco had drafted Lance, anyone who had just bet a hundred dollars on that outcome walked away up a mere fifty-five bucks.
For years, the NFL draft has provided endless fodder for proposition bets, or âpropsâ; this year, they ranged from how many wide receivers would be selected in the first round (five) to the color of the dress worn by Marissa Mowry, the wife of No. 1 pick Trevor Lawrence (black). Annually, the illegal market for sports gambling in the United States has been known to draw an estimated $150 billion. But ever since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on most sports gambling outside Nevada, more than two dozen states have legalized it, and thereâs been a mad dash to build upon the fanaticism: Last summer, DraftKings, an online sportsbook, paid $100 million for the right to open a gambling parlor at Chicagoâs Wrigley Fieldâan idea that NBA owners, too, have endorsed for basketball arenas. The PGA Tour agreed recently to open a sportsbook at one of its tournament courses. In April, the NFL partnered with three sportsbooks in a deal worth nearly a billion dollars. By 2025, legal sports gambling nationwide is projected to be worth $10 billion.
Media companies have also entered the businessâsports bettors watch about twice as many games as non-bettors do, and Bleacher Report found that gamblers are five times more engaged with its app than other spectators. In the past year, NBC Sports negotiated a partnership with a sportsbook called PointsBet worth nearly $500 million. ESPN, Fox, and CBS signed deals with other gambling companies, including old-school casinos like Caesars. DraftKings agreed to pay $50 million to distribute podcasts by Dan Le Batard, formerly of ESPN. In May, the Associated Press announced that it would exclusively reference betting odds from FanDuel, DraftKingsâ archrival. And still, the integration of sports media and gambling is probably in just the top of the first inning.
With thousands of props available every day, updating online in real time during games, the opportunity for journalists to capitalize on behind-the-scenes access would seem irresistible. Not everyone plays it like Rapoport. Reporters covering Wall Street would, in theory, find themselves in the same ethical mud, except that mainstream outlets strictly prohibit their employees from investing in the companies they cover. (The Securities and Exchange Commission wouldnât approve, either.) By contrast, some two dozen prominent sports journalists told me, gambling in the press box is common, especially in football, and few sports outlets bar reporters from betting within their beats.
Perhaps no one is as open on the subject as Bill Simmonsâthe CEO of The Ringer, the media company he sold to Spotify last year for $196 million, and a proud gambling obsessive. On his podcast, Simmons provides sports analysis interspersed with boasts and moans about his recent bets. Occasionally, his disclosures have gotten him in trouble: Simmons, one of a hundred media figures who votes on NBA end-of-season awards, said that heâd bet on LeBron James to win Most Valuable Player, only to let slip that, of course, heâd also voted for James; the league didnât like that, and discounted his ballot. But by and large, Simmons, and The Ringer, have benefited enormously from going all-in on gambling. In May, The Ringer reached a partnership agreement with FanDuel for an undisclosed sum.
So it goes for many media companies, at a loss for revenue and drooling over the profit potential in sports betting. As gambling swallows up sports media, anyone pausing to consider editorial conflicts (or, in the case of bets based on nonpublic information, possible law-breaking) might feel left out. Michael Lombardi, a former NFL team executive who later became a sports reporter, now gives gambling advice at VSiN, known as âthe CNBC of sports betting.â Recently, he told me, âIf you donât like change, youâre going to like irrelevance even less.â
The DraftKings vision for a betting venue at Wrigley is, in a sense, baseball come full circle. In the 1870s, gambling lured fans to the first professional ballgames, where bookmakers stood in the stands, accepting fistfuls of cash as they shouted odds on everything from the next at-bat to whether the wind would change direction. Newspapers began publishing box scoresâan unintended aid to bookies, who traffic in statistics. Once it became clear that baseball attracted more gamblers than idle spectators, some papers became openly disdainful in their coverage of games. In 1872, the New York Times claimed that, despite baseballâs popularity, âit is simply ridiculous to style it a national pastime,â adding, âBase-ball, so far as it can claim to be a typical American institution at all, is simply a contrivance for gambling that most honest men would cheerfully see suppressed.â Four years later, when the National League was founded, its officials vowed to rid the sport of gambling.
On that front, baseball failed spectacularly. After years of rumored fixed games, gamblers bribed eight players on the Chicago White Sox to throw the 1919 World Seriesâa scandal that, for the next century, would be cited as evidence of bettingâs corruptive influence, and inspired many states to outlaw sports gambling. In 1947, Jake LaMotta paid Mafia members twenty thousand dollars and took a dive in a fight in exchange for a shot at a title bout, a shameful boxing moment memorialized in Raging Bull. Las Vegas began collecting bets in 1949, but Congress did all it could to undermine bookmakers, from imposing a 10 percent tax on sports gambling revenue to criminalizing the use of wires and mail to place bets or share gambling information across state lines. Journalists often helped expose gambling scandals, as in 1951, when Max Kase, the sports editor of the New York Journal-American, tipped off prosecutors that college basketball players were taking bribes to shave pointsâincluding at the City College of New York, the reigning NCAA champion. Kase won a Pulitzer Prize.
By the seventies, sports gambling had been linked to seedy mobsters, demonized by the Christian right, and fiercely opposed by owners of teams. Nevertheless, it flourished underground as a multibillion-dollar industry. Jimmy âThe Greekâ Snyder, a Vegas oddsmaker and syndicated columnist, was hired in 1976 to join The NFL Today, a CBS pregame show, at a time when it was still verboten for sports broadcasts even to acknowledge gamblingâs existence. On air, the Greek would predict winners and final scoresâa compromise with polite society that surely fooled no one, like drinking on the street from a bottle wrapped in a paper bag. (He had a popular run until he was thrown off air for making racist comments about Black athletes.)
Across the country, sports pages increasingly featured gambling advice. In Las Vegas, full-time bettors, or âsharps,â would huddle outside McCarran Airport, waiting for deliveries of out-of-town newspapers with updates on injuries, lineups, and any other scraps of information. John Clayton, a top football reporter, started out as a teenager covering the Pittsburgh Steelers for a local paper in Pennsylvania. âIt was a steelworker town,â he said. âOther than going out to drink, what you did was gamble.â Some bettors tried to bribe him for information before it was published. (He declined.) The market for gambling news was undeniable. âNo medium has been quicker to adapt to that phenomenon than newspaper sports sections,â Sports Illustrated observed in 1979. âItâs now an open question whether their most avid readers are fans or bettors.â That year brought the founding of ESPN, which soon aired a gambling show from Caesars Palace during the NFL playoffs.
By the mid-eighties, roughly three-quarters of newspapers published NFL betting lines. There remained gambling dissenters: Bob Knight, the volatile Indiana University basketball coach, said that papers âmight just as well run the telephone numbers of prostitutesâ; the Times refused to publish lines and picks on the grounds that most of them would be used illegally, though its sports editor told SI that moral protest might seem like âsticking your head in the sand.â In 1985, the Cincinnati Enquirer announced that it would cease printing point spreads, only to relent after getting bombarded with furious calls from readers.
Gambling on certain sports was more palatable than othersânamely horse racing, because of a carveout that made it legal (and taxed): horse gambling is conducted in a pool, through âpari-mutuel betting,â with odds that fluctuate based on who bets what, as opposed to everyone competing against a house oddsmaker. For a while, the Times and Washington Post each had a Harvard alum covering the horse racing scene: Steven Crist, at the Times, and Andrew Beyer, who in the Post offered such advice as âMortgage the house. Hock the family jewels. Crack open the kidsâ piggy bank. Badger Land is a mortal lock to win at the Preakness.â They were credible, as an SI profile reported: âBeyer and Crist both bet as well as they write.â At tracks with clerks ready to take bets from inside the press box, Beyer claimed to make upwards of $50,000 a year picking horses. Crist, prohibited by the Times from betting on races he was covering, still once managed to win $90,000 on other horses.
But when journalists placed illegal bets, they had to be discreet. Bud Geracie, a longtime sports editor of San Joseâs Mercury News, got his start in journalismâand gamblingâworking nights at United Press International in Madison, Wisconsin. âI was mostly the only person in the office except for the security guy, Jack, a small-time bookie who had moved from Las Vegas,â Geracie said. Jack took Geracieâs bet on the 1982 Super Bowl: San Francisco versus the Cincinnati Bengals. âIâm still a college student,â Geracie remembered. âI took four hundred dollars out of my savings account and handed Jack an envelopeâânot realizing that illegal bets were accepted on credit. He picked the 49ers, who won 26â21. âI got eight hundred dollars back from Jack,â he said. âI was off and running.â
More than a decade before Congress declared sports gambling âa national problemâ and prohibited states from legalizing it if they hadnât already, a writer named Daniel Okrent cooked up an alternative market. Called the âRotisserie League,â it provided a means by which baseball fans could invest in a lineup of real players, as the theoretical managers of their own teams, over the course of a season. On a trip to Austin, he pitched the idea to editors at Texas Monthly; they passed. But in 1980 he went ahead, charging friends an entry fee of $250. The winner would collect half the pot. In time, âRotisserieâ was formalized as a trademarked company; eventually, more contests sprang up, across more sports. Crucially, âfantasy leagues,â as they became known, were considered a âgame of skill,â rather than a âgame of chance,â making them legal even after 1992, when Congress laid down its broad ban. Mostly, prize money was modest, which helped coworkers and college buddies justify what seemed a dubious loophole. Because fantasy leagues started in an analog era, early participants sometimes attempted to collect data through extraordinary means. (As Okrent told Ben McGrath in The New Yorker, there were âpeople calling the P.R. department and pretending to be journalists, asking whether the pitcherâs arm was still hurt.â)
Even in the internet age, managing oneâs fantasy roster for an entire season can be labor intensive. FanDuel, in 2009, and DraftKings, in 2012, began promoting daily contestsâa shrewd way of attracting interest while draining customersâ accounts drip by drip. (My dad bets about a buck seventy-five on daily fantasy baseball, a seemingly modest wager that adds up to roughly three hundred dollars over the course of a season.)Â When these companies emerged, sports-journalism outlets recognized them quickly as gambling in disguise. Nigel Eccles, FanDuelâs founding CEO, told me, âI remember one senior ESPN executive telling us we were going to jail.â
But there were some boosters. One was Simmons, who in 2002 issued his first âmanifestoâ for ESPN about how to bet on the NFL playoffs. âFans are brainwashed to believe gambling is dangerous,â he wrote a few years later. âGambling is a part of sports; we may as well accept it.â Another early advocate was Chad Millman, the editor in chief of ESPN The Magazine, where he established a gambling beat, devoted an issue to the subject, and launched ESPN.comâs âChalkâ section for betting news. He was drawn to the lingoââItâs a very clubby, insidery, 1950s Rat Pack cool,â he told meâand aimed to fill a massive reporting void. âWhy do point spreads move the way they do? Why are professional bettors making certain decisions? At the time this was still a vein that was only remotely tapped by deep journalism.â
Today, as states legalize sports gambling, roughly 60 percent of daily fantasy players are converting to betting. At The Ringer, Simmons and his team are eager to serve that audience, with a hybrid dialect of gambling analysis and conventional sports talk. âItâs a storytelling technique,â Kevin Clark, a football reporter, told me. âIn 2021, when youâre saying whoâs going to be rookie of the year, it would be weird not to discuss the odds. Thatâs now just part of the conversation.â In Detroit, where the Pistons have had an awful few years, Rod Beard, a Detroit News basketball beat writer, took a stab at writing a fantasy advice column. âWithin a day or two,â he said, âI got four thousand additional Twitter followers.â Lately, heâs covered Pistons games with an explicit daily fantasy âslant.â Doing so could be the saving grace for struggling newspapers, he said: âJust like people pay for stock tips, theyâll pay for paywalled content on betting.â
ESPNâs gambling-coverage offerings have expanded to include a Daily Wager talk show hosted by Doug Kezirian, who, in April, became part of the story: A pro bettor reportedly tipped him off that Tyson Campbell, a cornerback at the University of Georgia, was likely to be drafted much sooner than expected. Kezirian discovered that BetMGM had labeled Campbell as a safety by mistake, making his odds (100-to-1) to be the first safety off the board seem absurdly low. âWe all have different strengths as bettors, and mine are instincts,â Kezirian later told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He drove to the Bellagio, saddled up to a self-serve kiosk, and placed about a dozen $200 bets on Campbell. When the Jacksonville Jaguars selected Campbell at the top of the second round, Kezirian and his pro-bettor partner won nearly $300,000. (Kezirian never touted his bet on air.)
Increasingly, sports betting news comes directly from sportsbooksâoften by way of former journalists who have decamped for higher-paying posts. Millman decided to raze the wall separating sports reporting from the action when, in 2017, he left ESPN to help found a sports betting media startup called the Action Network. Like VSiN, the Action Network offers articles, podcasts, and data-crunching tools for gamblers. The site publishes betting-minded sports coverage (e.g., a recent assessment of âswirling windsâ that were forecast ahead of the MLB All-Star Game) and provides a Consumer Reportsâstyle ranking of the best sportsbooks (DraftKings earns the top spot, with a 9.9 out of 10). âWeâre digging into information; weâre providing a service,â Millman said. Theyâre also doing extensive business with companies they cover, such as charging a referral fee on placed bets. Itâs a blatant conflict of interestâthough not so different from that of conventional newsrooms striking deals with gambling companies. âAre you going to allow sponsors to dictate coverage?â J.A. Adande, Northwestern Universityâs director of sports journalism, wondered recently. âYou canât tell me that itâs impartial now.â
This spring, after receiving bids from DraftKings and FanDuel, the Action Network was sold to a Danish betting company called Better Collective for $240 million. âItâs pretty insane,â Millman said. Around the same time, DraftKings bought VSiN for nearly $70 million. Lombardi, who has spent his career on all sides of the sports-media-betting playing field, waved off any concern about crossing over into gamblingâthe only difference between covering sports for a news outlet and a gambling site, he told me, is who signs his paycheck. A number of sports journalists have, apparently, accepted those terms, as sportsbooks morph into media operations, poaching more talent from traditional outlets: Ryan Spoon, ESPNâs former senior vice president of digital content; Len Mead, recently of NBC Sports; Joe Lago, of The Athletic.
Itâs slippery turf, though: gamblers are competing, in a sense, against the company taking their bets; sports reporters at DraftKings, FanDuel, and casinos could face pressure to tip off their coworkers before breaking news; analysts might be asked to promote betting strategies that favor their employersâ interests. Teddy Greenstein, a longtime Chicago Tribune writer, assured me that he hasnât encountered any of those conflicts in his new gig, providing gambling advice at PointsBet. âMy buddy said, âIn ten years, weâre all going to be working for teams, leagues, or online sportsbooks,âââ he said. âPeople in the industry know whoâs got the money.â
A decade ago, Jim Armstrong, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the Denver Post, was covering the Colorado Rockies. He was also, apparently, betting on games. He probably could have carried on doing both, but in 2011 he was named in an indictment that revealed an illegal, high-stakes gambling ring operating out of bars and restaurants. Some of the bettors involved wagered fifty thousand dollars a week. Armstrong wasnât personally charged, but the Post fired him.
These days, you can place a bet from a smartphone in seconds, which makes it far more difficult to monitor journalistsâ gamblingâor, for that matter, bets they ask neighbors or cousins to place for them. In theory, sportsbooks can flag a bettor who has been enjoying an improbable winning streak, but companies lack the resources or incentive to investigate individuals. (Even if a four- or five-figure payday would thrill someone on a reporterâs salary, it wouldnât draw much attention inside FanDuel.) Itâs impossible to know exactly how many sports journalists are also sports gamblers, though lately more of them have become more open about placing bets. When Kezirian cashed in, he faced no penalty from ESPN.
âI think sportswriters are betting on games theyâre covering,â Vic Tafur, The Athleticâs Las Vegas Raiders beat reporter, told me. He knew of a basketball writer who acted on word from a coach: his team planned to slow down its pace on offenseâmeaning the next gameâs final score would likely be lower than oddsmakers expected. The writer âunloaded on the under and made a killing,â Tafur said. âItâs not a rare story.â The opportunities for insider betting are even greater in college sportsâwhich, unlike the pros, donât require teams to disclose injuries before games. Peter King, a football columnist at NBC Sports, told me that he knows âa lot of sportswriters who gamble.â He also has a friend who quit gambling when it almost ruined his life. âI have a lot of empathy for people who say maybe we shouldnât be in bed with these gambling companies,â King said. (Thereâs never such thing as a sure bet, regardless of what you think you know; even successful pro gamblers get just over half their bets right.)
The increasingly comfortable relationship between sports journalism and gambling has, not coincidentally, developed alongside a decline in sports mediaâand a collapsing market for the press at large. In recent years, Sports Illustrated laid off nearly half its staff; employees of Deadspin, beleaguered by the desperation of their corporate bosses, resigned en masse; even The Athletic, a once cash-flush upstart, let go of forty-six people. The Athletic went on to debut a sports betting section, walled off from the rest of the newsroom, with new hires including James Holzhauer, a pro gambler who won nearly three million dollars on Jeopardy! On television, leagues and networks are panicked over declining sports viewership; they can only hope that spectators will tune in to otherwise dull matchups if they have skin in the game. To lure fans, broadcasts air ceaseless gambling promotions: NBA playoff games are interrupted so that TNT studio hosts can offer tips on FanDuel props; MLB and NHL games run live betting odds onscreen. The Sinclair Broadcast Group renamed nineteen regional sports networks after Ballyâs casino; ESPN has experimented with airing gambling-focused alternate broadcasts of football and basketball games.
Displaced sports journalists may hope that gambling operators can provide them a home. But donât bet on the heroic rescue of a struggling outlet by a benevolent sportsbook. âAt the end of the day, all they want is to become the biggest gambling company in America,â Albert Chen, the author of Billion Dollar Fantasy, told me. He cited DraftKingsâ reported interest in acquiring Bleacher Report. âSwallowing up Bleacher Report would certainly help acquire customers,â he said. âBut thatâs the bottom line. Thatâs it. Itâs not a vision of FanDuel or DraftKings to become a repository of good sports content.â Eccles, of FanDuel, agreed. From a gambling companyâs perspective, he said, if a sports site âis totally independent and really run from an editorial angle, if itâs not benefiting you, why the hell own it?â
For sportsbooks, reporters merely provide a means to an end: credibility by association. âI still follow journalism rules,â Greenstein said of his job at PointsBet. âBut I joke with people, âItâs not journalismâitâs much more fun.âââ
Danny Funt is a senior editor at The Week and a former CJR Delacorte Fellow. Follow him on Twitter at @dannyfunt