Richard J. Severson

It appears that Brendan Sorsby has let the NCAA, Big 12 conference, Texas Tech University, and the entire prefecture of college sports off the hook by applying for the NFL’s supplemental draft. Ipso facto, that nullifies his NCAA lawsuit, and his eligibility to play quarterback for Texas Tech. (Nine thousand bets later, the wobble of planet football is self-correcting.)

Whew! Dodged a bullet there, right? Maybe.

We’ve seen this movie before. The ugly consequences of addiction become the lightning rod for a collective legal meltdown. The national prohibition of alcohol from 1920-1933 is a stark preamble. So, too, the more recent opioid epidemic. Remember the decades of debate regarding cigarettes and lung cancer? It’s quite a list of what are sometimes called “crimes against society” (or, to be slightly old-fashioned about it, acts of moral depravity).

Plain and simple: Is sports betting a personal moral depravity issue? (That seems to be what the semi-delusional doyens at Texas Tech believe.) Or, is there something more going on, a harm not just to the person with a gambling problem, but to society at large? When does a personal bad habit merit a societal or legal restraint for the betterment of all? This is the continuum along which we wrestle with personal moral depravity issues (addiction might be a more neutral-nonjudgmental-medical term for the downside of such habits as excessive alcohol consumption, pot smoking, gambling, and so forth). Crimes of moral turpitude—robbery, assault, and murder, for instance—are more obviously harmful, and not on any kind of spectrum as a result.

The Sorsby controversy is not just a crisis of the integrity of college sports, as the NCAA insists. Instead, it seems like a logical-yet-regretful outcome to the recent cultural tsunami of betting on sports. It is the lightning-quick embrace of gambling (forget about those old-timey Vegas junkets) that landed us in the rotten underbelly-cesspool of addiction and its criminal backwash. In this broader cultural context, it might have similarities to the Great Recession of 2008 when over-leveraged subprime mortgage securities began to fail.

Gambling is to subprime mortgages what the Sorsby case is to the Great Recession. It’s the shift in cultural attitudes and practices preceding the crises that are responsible for the crises. In the case of the Big Short/Great Recession, the change was in how mortgage applications were vetted. Being able to afford a house became secondary to simply desiring to have one, whether it was financially realistic or not. Subprime mortgage securities made it easy for local brokers to look the other way when clients without the requisite financial resources applied for loans that they could never pay back. Likewise, the joyous celebration of gambling on every conceivable athletic outcome (which player, for instance, will be the first person to make consecutive free throws in the first half of XYZ basketball game?).

Like the subprime mortgage industry, sports gambling is burdened by its own naïve neglect of the potential for serious and widespread cheating, and other immoral conduct. A case in point that comes to mind: the vitriolic social media messages that many professional tennis players (women, in particular) have received after losing a match that some angry gambler expected them to win.