Vegas set the Over/Under at a staggering 57.5 points, officially the highest total in Super Bowl history. Why was the line so high? It was a collision of two offensive juggernauts. The Falcons arrived with the league's top-scoring offense, led by MVP Matt Ryan, while Tom Brady's Patriots ranked third in points scored. Throw in a fast track at the NRG Stadium dome in Houston, and bettors were practically tripping over themselves to hammer the Over.
The New England Patriots have been able to ride a motley crew of individuals to Super Bowl LX, including a wide receiver in Kayshon Boutte who appeared to be completely left for dead by the NFL after some personal struggles at LSU. Boutte's most infamous problem was related to an unhealthy relationship with gambling on sports. This ultimately led to him seeing his pro stock fall off a cliff and struggling to get acclimated to life in the NFL after he arrived in New England.
Before you read any of this, use this article for entertainment purposes because it discusses risky gambling in a hedge against buying tickets to see your Washington Nationals. This idea came from Twitter/X's, Crabcakes&Football, an account that frequently gets salty about the Nats. And that account certainly isn't alone in the growing pessimism. A discussion with constant curmudgeon, @dclandofnerds, led to an X.com discussion (see below) that led to this article.
Barstool founder Dave Portnoy is an internet celebrity turned real life D-list celebrity thanks to his partnership with Fox Sports, and he is the avatar for the crisis of American masculinity. He posted a video over the weekend that I think serves as a metaphor for how Trump got elected. A bunch of aggrieved and broken guys like this gambling their life savings on sports, stocks and memecoins all convinced themselves that a con artist actually cared about them. Now much of the manosphere are realizing that they're the ones who got conned, and some like Portnoy seem to be fraying at the edges.
The Justice Department says that Clase and Ortiz repeatedly threw pitches out of the strike zone as part of a scheme with gamblers who would wager on those pitches to be balls. Sometimes, the bettors would also wager on the velocity of the pitches. These were the first pitches of at-bats, where sportsbooks offered action on whether it would be a ball or strike.
From time to time in this column, I like to look at something I wrote in the past and see if it holds up to retrospective scrutiny. Early last year, after the baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani and his interpreter Ippei Mizuhara were ensnared in a major gambling scandal that ended with Mizuhara in jail, I wrote a column titled "Online Gambling Is Changing Sports for the Worse," in which I expressed concern for the "integrity of the game," and worried that betting by athletes and others around them—Ohtani himself denied any involvement and was never charged with anything—might begin occurring with such frequency that it would cause the public, including children, to lose faith in what they were watching.
NEW YORK -- Former NBA player and assistant coach Damon Jones pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges he profited from rigged poker games and provided sports bettors with non-public information about injuries to stars LeBron James and Anthony Davis. Jones, a onetime teammate of James, said little during back-to-back arraignments in federal court in Brooklyn, letting his court-appointed lawyer enter not guilty pleas in a pair of cases stemming from last month's federal takedown of sprawling gambling operations.
Jaylen Brown admitted that he isn't fully up to date on the details in the illegal gambling scandal that led to the arrests of three NBA figures, but he isn't a fan of the betting culture that's made its way into sports. The Celtics star called for more player support from the NBA on sports gambling, believing players have been made vulnerable to social media attacks due to wagers placed on them.
