If Giants receiver Malik Nabers hadn’t blurted out The pivot podcast his $10,000 bet with Commanders rookie (and former LSU teammate) Jayden Daniels about which of them would win Offensive Rookie of the Year, the bet would still stand.
As far as we know, it still happens.
The relatively simple trick in situations like this is to compress. If Nabers hadn’t spoken up, no one would have known about the bet. So if one of them had won, the other would have given him $10,000 and that was it.
That’s one of the biggest problems with the NFL’s effort to take do as we say and not as we do approach to the game. There’s a lot of information the NFL will never have.
Last month, the Commissioner clumsily tried to justify the NFL’s continued money grab by saying that the league needs to be in partnership with sportsbooks in order to get information from them about players who may be using those apps to bet. violate the rules. Implicit in this explanation is the fact that the league does not have the ability to catch players who violate gaming policy, as long as they are discreet.
As a source with extensive knowledge of locker room dynamics recently explained, players are always betting on each other. It is an extension of a culture based on competition.
“They bet everything against each other,” the source said. “Their whole life and every thing they do is a competition with each other and each other.”
The key is to keep quiet about it. That’s where Nabers went wrong. Now that both Nabers and Daniels have said the bet is off, there’s nothing stopping them from winking and nodding at each other, with one ready to give the other a $10,000 gift if/when he wins the prize.
It is not yet clear whether the bet itself violates the rules, whether it was blocked before it was drawn up. That’s the unresolved gap in all of this.
Could a player, before being drafted, place legal bets on NFL games and prizes? The league has no power over him before he is signed. If the bet is made before he enters the NFL but is not settled until he is subject to league policies, is that a violation?
