A critical concern that has been highlighted is the potential impact of sports gambling on the work of sports officials.
This idea gained further attention following recent comments made by Dean Blandino, former Vice President of officiating for the National Football League (NFL) from 2013 to 2017.
The remarks were made during his appearance on an episode of the Awful Announcing podcast. In the podcast, Blandino addressed this topic amid further questioning.
Although he acknowledged the escalating scrutiny on officials, he maintained that he couldn’t definitively claim that legalized sports betting has directly impacted their jobs.
Nevertheless, he admitted that the situation demands progressively strenuous preventive measures. The NFL has previously shown its commitment to maintaining the integrity of its games, even in the face of these new challenges.
In an effort to ensure that its sport continues to resonate with true competitiveness and fairness, the NFL has instituted rigorous protocols for its officials.
This extensive vetting process includes background checks where NFL security representatives converse with potential officials’ neighbors, assessing the person’s reputation in depth.
“They look at all of your business associations. They look for conflicts of interest — all of that, bank accounts, everything,” Balndino told host Brandon Contes. “And there’s checks during the season. And so, they’ll look at if a game official has $10 in their bank account on Friday, and then they work a game, and now there’s $100,000; that’s a red flag, right? So, you’re checking those things. You’re monitoring the betting lines and looking at how calls impact those lines and are their individual officials that are involved in more of those calls. It’s a massive, massive undertaking. Because what the league doesn’t want and what we never wanted was a situation like what happened with the NBA, right?”
The NFL’s practices echo its aim to preempt scandals, similar to the one that the National Basketball Association (NBA) grappled with.
The scandal involved Tim Donaghy, a former NBA official who was implicated in betting on games that he officiated.
“It’s created more scrutiny,” said Blandino. “I think it’s created more pressure, and that’s not gonna change. It’s only going to increase as we move forward.”
However, despite these robust protocols, Blandino confessed that attempts had been made in the past to potentially influence NFL officials.
“We’ve had situations where people were approached,” Blandino revealed. “We’ve always told our game officials because they’re in hotels — they’re traveling around during the season — we didn’t want them wearing NFL-branded gear. We didn’t want them to be inconspicuous because someone sees them and ‘Oh, those are the NFL officials,’ and then you never know. You don’t know who you’re gonna come across. And they know that they’re supposed to go to NFL security if something like that happens. And that has happened in the past.
“They’re not allowed to go…if they have to go to their casino, maybe in their other job, there’s a speaking engagement, it’s at a casino they can’t go in the sportsbook. They have to let the NFL know that they’re gonna be in Las Vegas for this event and are gonna be staying at wherever. There a lot of controls in place.”
Despite these protective protocols, past incidents have called into question the efficacy of these measures.
Blandino himself admitted that NFL officials have been approached with the intent of swaying a game’s score or stats.
Dean Blandino: NFL officials have been approached to manipulate games for sports betting reasons https://t.co/RkC0SFCAJh pic.twitter.com/Iht2i395Nu
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) December 14, 2023
Evidently, enhanced measures are required to combat this concern.
