Professional-sports leagues would like you to believe they have the gambling problem under control. They have hired high-tech security companies to monitor wagers at a granular level and implemented sophisticated algorithmic systems to spot unusual gambling activity, ensuring that no athlete would be foolish enough to wager on a game.
But they are clearly no match for the highly addictive, always-intriguing prop bet.
Yesterday the sports world welcomed yet another gambling scandal. This time, it allegedly involves an NBA player, a former player with connections in locker rooms, a well-known head coach, more than two dozen other individuals, and, in a bit of a throwback twist, the Mafia. According to the Department of Justice, the former player sold inside information to gamblers about players’ medical status while the current player, Terry Rozier, fixed his individual performance during a game in March 2023, so that others could cash in on prop bets by betting the “under.” This episode comes just as a new NBA season begins, and was considered momentous enough that FBI Director Kash Patel announced the news of the arrests himself, at a press conference in New York. In his opening remarks, Patel called the gambling bust both “wide-sweeping” and “historic.”
[Charles Fain Lehman: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake]
That might be true. But the situation is also alarmingly normal. Since the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door to legalized gambling in 2018, and most states permitted people to wager on their phones, gambling scandals, once rare in sports, have become a new American pastime. And prop bets have proved particularly ripe for manipulation. A prop bet is a wager on a specific occurrence during a game, rather than on the final result. In these wagers, people are guessing about the number of points a player might score, the total rushing yards they might have, or whether they might hit a home run—and that gives the athlete a lot of power in the outcome. An individual player would have a hard time making sure their team loses the game, but can easily miss some shots on purpose to keep their points below a certain target, or pull themselves out of the game with an apparent injury, so that they never have a chance to hit that home run.
The first of these scandals came in March 2024. At that time, the NBA opened an investigation into Jontay Porter, a player for the Toronto Raptors. Porter, who has since pleaded guilty, had conspired to fix his performance in games by faking injuries to ensure that he didn’t score. His co-conspirators, at least one of whom has also pleaded guilty, placed prop bets on Porter’s “unders” and won. Porter was banned by the NBA that April, but the problem didn’t go away. Another prop-bet scandal hit Major League Baseball in July of this year, when a sports book reported “suspicious betting” related to whether a Cleveland Guardians pitcher would throw a ball or a strike on a given pitch—something that, believe it or not, gamblers can bet on. That pitcher and another Guardians player remain under investigation. And while all of this was happening, the NCAA announced that it had banned three basketball players for manipulating outcomes to “win prop bets.”
Legalized gambling is clearly here to stay. It’s big business now. In 2024, sports books and casinos reported $13.7 billion in revenue from sports betting alone, a new record that shattered the previous year’s and is almost certain to be surpassed this year. According to projections from the American Gaming Association, people are betting on NFL games this fall like never before, as a raft of popular podcasts, radio shows, and the so-called worldwide leader in sports, ESPN, make gambling talk the centerpiece of sports talk. ESPN even has its own gambling app.
But prop bets pose a particular threat to the integrity of the game. As long as one athlete can fix the outcome of a wager, the temptation will continue to prove irresistible to some players. This temptation comes at a time when millions of Americans are betting billions of dollars on sports, and sometimes more than a billion on a single game. At some point, according to gambling-addiction experts, an athlete will manipulate their performance during one of these big games, if it hasn’t happened already. That leaves those who love sports with only one sensible option. It’s time to kill—or at least reel in—the prop bet.
This idea has a glimmer of political hope on both sides of the aisle. U.S. Representative Paul Tonko, a Democrat from New York, has introduced a bill called the SAFE Bet Act, which, among other measures, would ban prop bets on all college and amateur athletes. “Sports have always belonged to the American family, and now it’s been taken over by sports books,” Tonko told me yesterday after the latest scandal. “Our legislation is looking to reverse that and bring it back to families.”
Meanwhile, in Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, wants to go even further. His state already successfully banned prop bets on college athletes back in 2024, after basketball players at the University of Dayton endured abuse and threats from gamblers who had bet on their individual stats. Now DeWine advocates for banning prop bets in all sports to prevent athletes from putting themselves—and the game—at risk.
“I think the biggest concern is how easy it is to do,” DeWine told me yesterday. “It’s one action by one person. So it can be unilateral. It doesn’t involve anybody else.” He added that athletes can rationalize fixing a prop bet more easily than they can talk themselves into throwing an entire match. “I think an athlete could justify it in their own mind by thinking, I’m not doing anything that is really going to impact the outcome of the game. All I’m doing is maybe throwing the first pitch as a ball.”
[Read: ‘I’m treating guys who would never be caught dead in a casino’]
The leagues are aware that prop bets are a problem. Just this week, two days before the news of the FBI arrests broke, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said on The Pat McAfee Show that the NBA had asked gambling platforms to “pull back some of the prop bets.” At the MLB All-Star Game this summer, commissioner Rob Manfred signaled that he, too, had concerns about props. “There are certain types of bets that strike me as unnecessary and particularly vulnerable,” Manfred told reporters, questioning the value of letting fans bet on things like balls and strikes. “Do we really need that last kind of bet?” Manfred asked.
But eliminating the prop bet entirely will be challenging. Since the first single-player prop bet was invented in the lead-up to Super Bowl XX, in January 1986—when William “The Refrigerator” Perry, a defensive tackle, opened at 20 to 1 to score a touchdown for the Chicago Bears—prop bets have become popular among degenerate gamblers and casual fans alike. If legal gambling platforms didn’t offer them in 2025, gamblers would probably turn instead to illegal bookies and illegal websites—a still-thriving world where oversight hardly exists at all.
Black markets aside, prop bets might simply be too valuable for sports books to cut loose. According to data compiled by the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University, bettors lose prop bets about 70 percent of the time. But, perhaps because these wagers can pay out handsomely when they hit, props are immensely popular—twice as popular as traditional bets on the point spread. And so, for now, prop bets remain—and they are everywhere. This weekend alone, you can place a bet on the Los Angeles Dodgers MVP Shohei Ohtani to hit a home run in Game 1 of the World Series, on his teammate Blake Snell to strike out more than 6.5 batters, on Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers to throw an interception on Sunday night, and on hundreds of other props. The question is, who else is betting on them with you?
