Officiating across the NFL has been questionable at best recently, and that’s putting it lightly. There have been multiple roughing the passer penalties over the last few weeks that completely changed the outcomes of plays, drives, and ultimately, games.
With the NFL fully entrenched in the sports betting industry, things are starting to look a bit shady with these calls.
Jason La Canfora and Carl Dukes of the Audacy Original Podcast “In The Huddle” talked about the recent uptick in penalties and the impact it’s having given the NFL’s gambling ties.
“I don’t know what the answer is but someone’s got to create – either out loud or quietly, just with inner office memos or whatnot – an edict that this pendulum has gone too far and certain crews need to really think long and hard about what they’re doing,” La Canfora said (5:08 in player above). “Jerome Boger called the Brandon Stephens play and the Grady Jarrett play. So there’s a disconnect there, and that doesn’t mean that other crews don’t have these same issues, we just haven’t seen it come to the fore.”
Here are the plays that Stephens and Jarrett were called for penalties on.
Neither seem especially egregious. In fact, it seems like they shouldn’t be penalties at all. Something has to be done.
“There are owners meetings coming up. There are ways to quietly send messages there,” La Canfora continued. “There are ways to quietly caucus with people, Troy Vincent, people in the NFL league office, and for certain owners to say look, the optics of this now, especially in an era where the league is – it’s not just dipping its toes in the gambling waters, it dove in! You pay us enough money, you can use our logos, you can use our stats, you can use our nicknames, you can use our proprietary stuff.
“OK, well then you got to clean this up because this is affecting the outcomes of games and it is affecting point spreads and over/unders and all that stuff that, you know what the NFL, you’re now in that business,” he continued. “You are in the business of wagering. You take all these sponsorships. You run all the ads. You accept all the money. You’re in the business and this looks shady.”
There’s been a complete shift in how the NFL and the media handle sports betting. It used to be taboo and now it’s everywhere.
“They used to tell us they didn’t care about that stuff. Before they entered this realm, this world of gambling. It was always ‘we don’t concern ourselves with that.’ Now it’s all anybody’s talking about,” Dukes said. “So I totally agree with you.”
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