America's Gambling Problem

By Rich Lowry on Oct 23, 2025

Terry Rozier of the Miami Heat has built a respectable NBA career, averaging about 20 points per game some years.

In all likelihood, though, the Miami Heat point guard will now be remembered less for what he did on the court than as another data point in how runaway sports betting is corrupting major athletics.

Rozier stands accused of tipping off gamblers that he would leave a game early in March 2023 based on a supposed injury. This allowed his coconspirators to bet the "under" on his performance and profit handsomely, sharing the proceeds with Rozier.

A former NBA player and unofficial coach for the Los Angeles Lakers, meanwhile, allegedly leaked to bettors the information that LeBron James, the NBA's biggest star, would be sitting out (for legitimate reasons) a game in February 2023.

This scandal is obviously a blow to the NBA's reputation. The league can't have fans thinking every time a player sits a shady associate has placed a pricey bet on DraftKings that he'll score fewer than 10 points.

There have been sports-gambling scandals before (Shoeless Joe Jackson, I'm looking at you). Yet we've created, out of nothing, an enormous industry that is inherently corrupting, encourages people to waste their money and ruins lives.

The corruption cases are adding up. Former Toronto Raptors center Jontay Porter recently pled guilty in a similar scheme to tank his performance, hoping to get relief from his own gambling debts. Two Cleveland Guardians pitchers are under investigation for unusual betting activity around specific pitches. And the NCAA announced last month that it banned three basketball players at Fresno State and San Jose State for betting on themselves and manipulating their performance.

Sports betting has always been with us, but it mushroomed into a juggernaut when the Supreme Court struck down in 2018, on federalist grounds, a ban on sports betting called the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act.

The sports leagues had opposed legalized sports betting on grounds, as they put it on one brief, that "gambling on amateur and professional sports threatens the integrity of those sports."

They were right, but we were off to the races nonetheless. With nary a pause for prudent experimentation, nearly 40 states legalized sports betting in a matter of several years.

According to ESPN, people wagered $150 billion and lost about $13 billion in 2023. FanDuel says there were almost 70,000 wagers a minute when betting on last year's Super Bowl was at its height.

The market is a powerful thing, and one of its greatest strengths is creating ever-more alluring products. In this case, that product -- lavishly marketed and constantly innovative -- is what has been traditionally considered a vice, and rightly so.

Writing in The Atlantic, Charles Lehman of the Manhattan Institute notes, "The rise of sports gambling has caused a wave of financial and familial misery, one that falls disproportionately on the most economically precarious households."

Since sports betting is addictive, Lehman continues, the industry's "profits largely come from the compulsions of people with a problem. A small number of people place the large majority of bets -- about 5% of bettors spent 70% of the money in New Jersey in late 2020 and early 2021."

What to do? It'd be best if states that haven't already legalized sports betting stay away, and states that have taken the plunge reconsider. That's unlikely, though.

America loves its sports betting, an obsession that transcends partisan politics. Polling sponsored by the American Gaming Association shows that two-thirds of Americans approve of legal sports betting, with an equal 71% of Democrats and of Republicans in favor.

At the very least, states should restrict so-called proposition bets on the individual performance of players, which is much more easily gamed than the outcome of a contest depending on the efforts of an entire team.

Once a relatively marginal phenomenon, sports betting is now part of the American mainstream, and we haven't seen the last of the scandals.

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(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)