We see this differently....as the say goes, "you show me a person's friends, and I will show them their future"......but at the end of the day, I agree with their motive...its always about following the dollars, regardless of the impact. I agree players gambling impacts integrity of the game. Have no issue with punishment...I am just saying how can people not predict that the probability of gambling increases, when its made to be much easier to do?
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-10/nfl-draftkings-lucrative-partnership-blurs-lines-between-sports-gambling
All of this brings seductive — sometimes addictive — betting much closer to kids, teens and older students while making gambling a more explicit centerpiece of sports. Young men are particularly vulnerable. As I’ve noted before, there possibly will be social fallout, and a bigger incentive for corruption, tied to these shifts. Regulation, meanwhile, will likely be scant and left to individual states.
"We've been very open about our position that we oppose legalized sports gambling,” Roger Goodell, the NFL’s commissioner, observed back in 2015. “We haven't changed our position on that, and I don't anticipate us changing that going forward at all. We think the integrity of the game is the most important thing.” What changed? An opportunity for the NFL to feast on fresh revenue streams emerged. The league said it expects to pull in $270 million this year from new gambling deals and as much as $1 billion by the end of this decade. Sports betting companies, freed by a 2018 Supreme Court ruling to operate in states other than Nevada, and given a huge boost by shut-ins looking for fun during the Covid-19 lockdown, have even bigger piles of money awaiting them.
A Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analyst recently estimated that the online sports betting market could grow to about $39 billion by 2033, up from about $900 million currently. Goldman, which the NFL also retained to find partners that can help it expand the reach of its media properties, thinks that cord-cutting and streaming have made it hard for sports leagues to attract younger fans. Lo and behold, sports betting skews much younger than traditional casino gambling — and thus offers leagues a way to reel in loyalists younger than 40.