“For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and by craving it, some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Fridays on here are fun, but they’re also a challenge. They’re fun because I take time to write about things that are purely interests for me—thus you get lots of reviews of superhero movies and series. It’s also a challenge, though, because unlike the other four days of the week, I don’t necessarily know what I’m going to write about very far ahead of time. I have more than once gotten to Thursday evening actively still wondering what was going to be on tap for the next day. That was the case this week, in fact. At least it was until my sports fanatic son sent me a note about a sports betting ring involving a bunch of college basketball players being broken up this week. We talked about sports betting a few weeks ago, but here we are again because this was one I just couldn’t ignore.

I’ll just lay my cards on the table out of the gate here: I think sports betting is stupid. It used to be largely illegal. It is very arguably immoral. It’s highly addictive. (Any product that gets advertised along with a number to call to get help with not using it should probably be a tipoff that it’s not so good to use.) It wrecks families. It leads to higher instances of domestic abuse. All of this and more is the case, but mostly it’s just stupid.

Think about it: you’re placing money down that you may or may not be able to afford to lose on something happening that you have absolutely no way of influencing or otherwise impacting in any way, shape, or form. You are simply playing the odds. The thing about odds is that sometimes they fall in your favor, and sometimes they don’t.

In sports odds are a particularly fickle friend. The best sports stories are nearly always about people or teams who beat the odds and manage to score impossibly unlikely wins. Those make for exciting stories, but they’re not so good for gamblers. There’s literally no way of knowing on any given night how an individual player is going to perform. Even the best ones. Maybe they play great; maybe they don’t. Who knows.

I got to take my boys to see Kansas’ basketball team play NC State a few weeks ago. The game would have been a complete bust had it not been for one player on our team who had a career high in points. He made more three pointers that night than he had made almost the entire previous season. He couldn’t miss. Nobody could have predicted that.

To bet money on an outcome that wildly unpredictable doesn’t make the first bit of sense. It makes even less sense if you don’t have money to lose. But if you were to do it, you don’t have any right to get upset if you lose. You can be legitimately upset with the player, the team, the coaching, or anything or anyone else not directly connected to the outcome. You can be upset with yourself for doing something so stupid as that, but you don’t get to take that out on anybody else. Because you don’t know.

But here’s the thing about sports betting and betting in general: we want to win. If we were to have a way to predict or fix the outcome, we are going to be sorely tempted to try it so that we did have some sort of a guarantee of victory, or at the very least to adjust the odds in our direction.

Well, the world of organized sports betting has just such a way. You simply involve players in the gambling—the very players who will be involved in the contest and who could conceivably adjust their performance to influence the outcome in a certain direction. If they are working with someone who is actively trying to run up the bets on a particularly unlikely and thus higher yielding in terms of return events, they stand poised to make a lot of money.

As it turns out, that is just the thing discovered to have been happening with a large group of college basketball players spread over a number of different teams over a period of months to years. They would select a certain outcome from the game—beating the spread, for instance—and adjust their playing to make that outcome more or less likely, depending on what and how they had wagered on it. Several of these players were even actively recruiting others into their scheme.

Saying, “I told you so,” is never a terribly polite thing to do, but to all those folks who fast tracked and otherwise forced through the legalization of widespread sports gambling like we have today across this country over the objections of those who argued against it on any number of grounds: we told you so.

And if this was the first time something like this had happened, that would be bad, but maybe it could be considered merely a departure from the norm. We can just leave things alone and they’ll work themselves out the right way eventually. But this isn’t the first player-involved sports gambling ring that has been broken up. This isn’t the first sports league that has had this happen. It has happened in the NBA as well as the MLB. It’s probably happening in other places.

Here’s the truth: Sports betting is ruining sports. Three times in three leagues represents three strikes. It needs to be thrown out everywhere. No longer when watching a sporting event can you have the kind of confidence you once did that everything is simply happening like it is. Until sports betting is made completely illegal we will now forever be wondering whether the player didn’t narrowly miss catching that ball because sometimes that just happens or because he is involved in a bet that he will only catch so many balls in that game? Did the player miss that shot because of the law of averages working against him, or did he bet that he (or the whole team) would only score so many points?

It’s worse than that. When you have bet on some aspect of a game or are part of a betting pool where you have placed money down based on the oddsmakers’ spread for several games, you don’t simply cheer for your team like you once did. Don’t get to simply participate in the excitement of the contest. You are cheering for or against teams based on whether or not their performance will help you win your bets. Casual watching is gone. Now you have a financial stake in the outcome. That doesn’t make it more fun, it makes it more stressful. When a player under performs for some reason, he hasn’t just let his team down, he has hurt you financially. At what point will some gambler decide that a player has hurt him financially enough times that he’s going to find a way to do something about it personally? It is already true that there is a direct link between sports betting losses and incidents of domestic abuse. He can’t take it out on the player who failed him, but he can take it out on his wife or girlfriend of kids.

There is literally not a positive argument for this. It’s not harmless fun. It doesn’t make games more enjoyable. It doesn’t make the sports more competitive. It’s a deeply unwise use of finite resources, especially in situations when resources are already limited. No, what lies at the heart of the expansion and rapid proliferation is something that has plagued the world and destroyed relationships for a very long time. That thing is greed.

Ever since the Fall we have not been satisfied with enough. We have been discontent with pure contentment. We always want more. More than that, we want more than. More than him. More than her. More than you. More than anyone. And we want it all for ourselves. We don’t want to share. We don’t want to work hard for our gain either. We have always been on the lookout for easy ways to increase our holdings. Gambling and its most popular modern form, sports betting, promises to be an easy way to get more. Just look at all of the many, many ads for it. They all promise quick, easy winnings. The amount of money all of this is generating is staggering. The trouble is that it’s not mostly going to the players. The saying notes that the House always wins for a reason. But still we pursue it because we are driven by greed.

The apostle Paul warned against this in his first letter to Timothy in rather memorable (if often misquoted) terms. “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” The wording that has captured popular imagination—the love of money is the root of all evil—is not what Paul said. Greed is not the most fundamental sin. Pride is, but that’s a conversation for another time. But the love of money does lie at the heart of a great deal of evil. It is a threat both to the unsaved and the saved alike. “And by craving it, some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” Truer words than that have only rarely been written. We are seeing this play out and will continue seeing it play out in more ways causing more harm to more people until this scourge is officially rendered illegal.

For now, you can do your part by refusing to participate. That may not seem like it will make much of a difference when so many other people are doing it with gusto, but they won’t get your money. You won’t subject your family to the harms that come from it. You’ll keep your precious resources freed up for works of kingdom-advancing generosity and faithfulness. Again, that may not seem like much, but when you are able to share your testimony of greater freedom and contentment with your resources than the person who is regularly experiencing losses from failed bets, you just may draw some others in to walk that path with you. That still may not change the world, but it will make a kingdom difference, and that matters. So do your part. I will too. Together, let’s work toward sports becoming once again what they truly can be.