It’s generally not good to tolerate hypocrisy. It feels gross to stand by powerless while you watch someone vehemently deride the very thing they were publicly justifying a day earlier.
Hypocrisy can take many forms in sports. That means it should be judged on a spectrum. It’s not wildly offensive when Colin Cowherd delivers a take that contradicts one he had a week earlier. A coach embracing an offensive style he once called dangerous is just good business. Hypocrisy is always distasteful, but maybe getting upset isn’t always worth the effort.
This is a strange time in sports. The relationship that leagues and the people covering them have with gambling is primed to create instances of hypocrisy when talking about a scandal like the one currently facing Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby.
It’s hard not to notice the conflicts of interest at play. What makes this situation and earlier ones like it so strange is not just that we have to accept them. As long as legal sports betting exists, fans have to embrace the hypocrisy at play.
Sportsbooks spend a lot! All of the money that FanDuel, DraftKings, and their competitors put into advertising is a foundational piece of sports media outlets’ budgets right now. ESPN’s deal with DraftKings probably doesn’t make up for everything it has lost as fewer and fewer Americans sign up for cable, but it sure helps.
DraftKings is pumping a lot of money into Bristol. As a result, lines and totals scroll across the bottom of the screen 24 hours a day, and multiple segments of Get Up, First Take, and even the once-vaunted SportsCenter are all about who to put money on tonight.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but it can make it a little hard to stomach some of the commentary. Rece Davis says that what Sorsby is betting on college football games is “beyond the pale” and that he has “forfeited” the right to play college football. Go look at an episode of College GameDay. Count how many times Davis asks his co-stars about underdogs and lines during a single three-hour episode. You’ll run out of fingers and toes real quick.
CBS was at least out on Front Street about its sports-gambling relationships. The original version of CBSSports.com’s article detailing the Sorsby story featured a paragraph about what Sorsby’s absence does to Texas Tech in the betting market. That paragraph has since been deleted.
It’s not just networks. Just about every major American pro sports league has an official gambling partner. Individual teams have struck their own deals, giving their home building its own official sportsbook. Since we’re all pretending prediction markets aren’t gambling, we even have a situation in which one of the NBA’s most famous players is allowed to invest in Kalshi.
I can see why it may be tempting to say the rules that applied to Pete Rose are archaic. It’s easy to point to the obvious, shameless hypocrisy of suspending a player for gambling while taking so much money from the sportsbooks. As much as it sucks, the leagues are doing the right thing.
These commissioners just have to swallow hard, dole out punishment, and accept all the outrage that is sure to come.
Our relationship with gambling has changed as a society. That’s okay. Gambling is like drinking. There are plenty of examples of how to do it responsibly, and there are consequences when you are irresponsible.
There is no way for an athlete to responsibly gamble on their own games. Bart Giamatti wasn’t just being a dick. Pete Rose had to be banned from baseball for the good of baseball. Just because he only bet on the team he managed to win, doesn’t mean he didn’t bet on the team he managed.
There will always be people who swear games are fixed. Right now, we mostly dismiss them as cranks, but the second the majority of fans buy into the idea that the games they are watching lack integrity, the leagues are in trouble.
The sports media have run a lot of cover for some of these scandals. In November, Michael Wilbon implied that he wasn’t sure that Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz deserved to be punished. The two Cleveland Guardians pitchers were accused of participating in a gambling ring that was fixing the outcomes of ball/strike bets.
There’s nuance in this discussion. Wilbon knows that. I have no reason to think the guy is acting nefariously, but it sure looks fishy – like PTI is trying to gloss over anything that may raise questions about the commercials that were coming right after that segment ended.
The coverage across various networks of the arrests of Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups was a little more egregious. Whether or not they were putting money on games is irrelevant. The two men were arrested for their participation in an illegal gambling ring. It’s not crazy to think that if they got in too deep, they could erase some debt by fixing the outcome of some bets. It worked for Jontay Porter…until it didn’t.
Both situations led to some very suspect coverage. In 2024, Stan Van Gundy dismissed the seriousness of charges against Porter by saying that he wasn’t good enough to fix games. His then-TNT colleague Charles Barkley lamented that Porter had to be banned from returning to the league. ESPN ignored the story entirely for a full hour after it broke.
In 2025, Stephen A. Smith was distracted from the charges against Rozier and Billups by FBI Director Kash Patel calling them a political stunt. Over on SiriusXM, Chris Russo flat-out said the charges do not matter.
Adam Silver was the first league commissioner to say American sports should embrace gambling, and it has come back to bite him in the ass. Anyone can understand why he may be looking to the NBA’s media partners for a little help.
Hypocrisy is infuriating, and it’s all around us. This time, though, we are just going to have to accept it.
Brendan Sorsby’s isn’t the first story of an athlete using his phone to place bets. It won’t be the last. It has shown up in college and all across the pros. All of those leagues will see it happen again. Our attitudes on gambling in general have changed, but when it comes to athletes, the result has to be the same every single time: their playing days are over.
Maybe the NFL will look the other way and make room for Brendan Sorsby in a supplemental draft. Maybe Sorsby’s new, very expensive lawyer can make things uncomfortable enough for the NCAA that they relent and give the guy a path back to eligibility. Either one would be bad for business.
So roll your eyes when Get Up goes from a segment including Bussin’ With the Boys, a show produced by FanDuel, to a discussion about Sorsby’s punishment. Shout back at the TV when self-avowed gambling enthusiasts Nick Wright and Danny Parkins mention Sorsby’s eligibility on First Things First. This is just one where there is no simple answer.
Money from gambling companies is too important to leagues and networks for those entities to refuse. That may change the way stories about gambling are covered. It may put league offices in the position of having to answer some awkward questions. It cannot change the fundamental truth that playing or coaching in a game gives a person influence over the outcome. But everyone has collectively decided it’s all part of the current cost of doing business.
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