Late during the NFL regular season, a game between the Cowboys and Lions featured what was perhaps the most controversial officiating of the year. I’m not going to recount everything that happened; if you know, you know, and if you don’t know, you probably don’t care. The Play itself is not my point anyway. What I want is to simply observe that virtually no one I’ve seen, except for Cowboys fans, was OK with how the officials handled that penalty. It seemed to me at the time, and still seems, a clear, obvious, game-altering mental error by referee Brad Allen (the NFL eventually removed Allen from officiating rotation for the playoffs). But you know what? Clear, obvious, game-altering mental errors by officials are part of sports, and have been forever. Of course, fans on the losing end of those errors don’t tend to just let things go. But everyone else does. We accept it as the human part of the game.
But there is one big difference between clear, obvious, game-altering mental errors by officials now and those that have happened in the past. The difference is that the major American sports leagues, especially the NFL, have not only endorsed gambling, but are working like dogs to profit from it at all costs. The NFL has pushed its official “sports betting partners” in a way I’ve never seen them push anything else, beer included. It is relentless. Every commercial break—and I mean every—features at least one and sometimes more than one ad for a sports betting app. There are billboards for Fanduel and Bet MGM literally a few feet away from each other on one stretch of I-65 here in Louisville. Almost as soon as the Supreme Court said it could, the NFL integrated sports betting it into its brand as aggressively and totally as possible.
What does the NFL’s having official “sports betting partners” have to do with bad officiating?
I don’t have to say it, do I?
And that’s the point I’m trying to make. You don’t need any direct evidence or even reasonable suspicion that NFL referees (or NBA refs, or MLB umpires, etc.) are doing something criminal in order to more easily entertain the thought than you might have ten years ago. I don’t believe that Brad Allen or any other NFL official currently working in the league is gambling on games and calling them accordingly. I don’t believe that, simply because I have no reason to believe that. There is no compelling evidence that such things are happening, and such a momentous belief merits that kind of evidence. So I don’t believe it’s happening.
But I do find it easier to believe. I do find my mind quicker to go there. If someone were to present some kind of evidence for ref corruption, I would believe it faster than I would have a decade ago. Why? Because the league has made gambling on football far more attractive and far more plausible than it was before. They have created new gamblers out of millions of people who had probably never seriously considered it before. They have beatified it, codified it, incentivized it, and commodified it. They have successfully executed a campaign to make people think of sports betting the same time they think of pro football.
And here’s the thing: You don’t get to create that kind of plausibility structure without all its implications. You don’t get to weave gambling into the very fabric of your product and then declare ex cathedra that your officials are obviously above suspicion. Maybe they haven’t done a thing. But guess what: They are the same kind of humans as the ones you’ve been trying to market your “$200 in free bets” to. Everybody knows it. And everybody is now thinking the same thing every time they see a call so inexplicably horrible as the one that went against the Lions.
Vice and Trust
The point that plausibility structures come with uncomfortable implications is one that is worth pondering.
Let’s take the topic of public trust. There is a ton of concern nowadays with restoring American society’s faith in its institutions and public life. Polls, conspiracy theories, elections, and much else consistently suggest that the typical American adult does not have a particularly gracious view of government, higher education, religious institutions, even his neighbors.
Why is public trust in credentialed, centralized institutions so low? Journalists working in the most esteemed places usually put the lion’s share of the blame on misinformation, especially politically charged misinformation. Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Knowledge is representative of this perspective, not just that misinformation and tribalism are the culprits, but that the solution is (curiously enough) to double down on expertise and a top-down model of epistemic hierarchy.
This theory treats public distrust and polarization as viruses that have invaded what would otherwise be a healthy intellectual body. But there’s another explanation: the idea that perhaps American government, organizations, media, and education have created plausibility structures through the things they privilege and beautify, and these plausibility structures are themselves the greenhouses where the distrust and polarization are grown. In other words, much like how the NFL has invited public distrust of its officiating by jumping into bed with sports betting, many American institutions invite postures of suspicion and division as people note how those institutions operate and the kind of values they express.
Discourse about rebuilding public trust is completely worthless unless it accounts for how the normalization of vice cultivates the suspicion of vice. In other words, the more politics, journalism, and pop culture engage in corruption, falsehood, and degeneracy, the more likely it is that people will assume corruption, falsehood, and degeneracy even in places where it may not be true. The NFL wants very much for its employees, teams, coaches, and players to be above suspicion when it comes to gambling. They are, however, eager for me to embrace it—not just to embrace it, but to, as one gambling app advertises, “make every moment more” by betting. Why should I assume that NFL refs, who are just as human as I am, want their lives to matter less than I do?
You Can’t Control It
Once sports betting was legalized, it was normalized, and because it was normalized, it proceeded to be marketized. Once something is marketized, though, it has a tendency of breaking free of all constraints that were initially imagined for it. This general pattern of culture holds true for far more than gambling. Pornography, for example, needed only the private and omnipresent technology of the smartphone to become the cultural touchstone by which a generation of men and women understand sex. The effects of this have gone far beyond the “adults only” vision that defenders of pornified “free speech” laid out for it. Exploitation of children, revenge porn, incels, iCloud account leaks, AI-generated porn—all of these are routinely denounced in socially progressive circles, but they are denounced as aberrations, or perhaps ideologically-created sins (“Whom did they vote for” becomes an important question about young men who commit crimes against the opposite sex).
One of the points that Abigail Shrier makes in her punchy new book Bad Therapy is that the dominance of the psychoanalytic method in mainstream education has led to the assumption that kids who struggle with anything from paying attention to physically assaulting their teachers are burdened by an undiagnosed trauma. This assumption among counselors and teachers is then transmitted to the students themselves, who begin to think there really is something mentally or emotionally dysfunctional about them—something only a certified therapist can fix.
This is a good example of how plausibility structures replicate but often go far beyond what was intended at first.
No therapist would ever actually say that they want every child to believe there is something crucially wrong with them, but because these therapists counsel, write, and act as if that’s true, the assumption cannot stay in its intended cage. It escapes, and grows. And before you know it, students are emotionally paralyzed by friendship, getting a license, going to college, or finding a spouse. No one intended this to happen. It was just a self-fulfilling prophecy.
People who gamble will assume that others gamble too. People who consume oceans of explicitness will assume that everybody does it. And because human nature always has a good reason for why I indulge in a vice, but suspects ill of anyone else who indulges in it too, the widespread belief that everyone is up to the same things I do secretly leads to a lack of trust.
Conversation about rebuilding trust in civil society is a waste of time until it acknowledges that trust is inseparable from virtue. You cannot demand people have trust in each other when everyone knows everyone else is free to break that trust. The only thing that can cultivate trust are shared boundaries. You will trust in an institution if you know from experience that it doesn’t tolerate the intolerable. You will trust in the results of a ball game if you know that the league eschews bribes. You will trust in your community if you know what people don’t do.
There are no free bets. You pay for them, because the house always wins. And it’s hard to forget that, even when watching the big game.
I agree that trust is eroded by vice. At the same time, I've observed how differently people are willing to give trust to institutions not just based on what these institutions do, but also on their own political position. For example, some see videos of police brutality as clear evidence of systemic racism, others see these examples as outliers in a generally decent police force. Instances of church abuse lead some people to say, "I can't trust the church anymore”, others are still able to go to church and believe these instances to be just a few bad apples.
One thing I've seen in some circles is that no matter what the government does, it's always met with skepticism. While some skepticism is well-deserved, other times I thought people judged too quickly.
I remember back in the 90's or maybe early 2000's Focus on the Family had worked with a Congressional research team to see the various effects of gambling, especially on sports. Ironically - Nevada would not allow gambling on _its_ teams at the time. That position changed around the time the report was released because they found that gambling most definitely _did_ affect sports. Most of the time the effects weren't huge, but the desire to tweak the outcome to change the odds or payouts is just part of our human/sin nature. Of course, the findings for that group largely went nowhere - because they showed that the gambling industry most definitely has a good amount of negative effects on society.
My bigger issue with the bad calls these days is that with the "replay" option for reviews, it's easier than ever to see truly bad calls and adjust them. I don't know much about this particular event, but the little I've seen indicates that the call was horrible and shouldn't have been allowed to stand after a review. So I can understand the concerns about a ref being pulled into this mess to make a game-altering call like that.