Will NFL ever catch players who place their bets through others?

If players have learned anything in recent months, it’s that any bets they place on their own phones could come back to haunt them. The next step in the league’s effort to detect gambling-policy violations will become harder for the NFL to prove.

When players use their phones to bet, those phones inevitably can betray them. When players use others to bet for them, how will anyone ever know?

That basic reality has been obscured by the stream of suspensions. To the average observer, the imposition of punishment creates an impression that the system works. The truth is that, so far, the NFL has captured only the lowest of the low-hanging fruit. For players who are or who will be making their bets through others, how will the league ever prove it?

It’s a simple approach. A family member or a friend opens the account and places the bet. The players finances the wagers. The player gets the winnings. Of course, the friend/family member might end up with a healthy tax bill if there are significant winnings. But that’s something the player who has won money that, for him, won’t be taxed can deal with at the proper time. (For players who bet and lose, it won’t be an issue.)

How would the league even begin to investigate such violations? Unless the sports books have the ability to track others in the player’s orbit, the sports books can never deliver the kind of clear evidence that has fueled the 10 suspensions dating back to Calvin Ridley, during the 2021 season.

The practice of players using others to place bets could end up being rampant. It might already be. For every player who didn’t simply know or understand how the technology works, there could be plenty of others that did and that do and that realize how to avoid getting busted.

The league likely would find out about only if the relationship between the player and the person doing the betting on the player’s behalf becomes fractured to the point that the person placing the bets decides to rat the player out. That’s why it would be critical for the player to use someone whom the player completely and totally trusts.

We don’t know how prevalent the practice is, and we won’t know. Perhaps at some point there will be a controversy involving a disgruntled family member or friend who blows the whistle on the player. Even then, that’s just one example that would come to light. How many others will there be that we never know about?

It could be a situation where the NFL doesn’t want to know. It surely knows it can’t effectively investigate or enforce such activity, and so it will wait for a situation in which someone contacts the league with a story to tell about money being funneled to that person by a player for the purposes of placing bets.

Before anyone accuses us of telling players how to beat the system, we haven’t exactly discovered plutonium with this. It’s an obvious workaround for players who are determined to bet on NFL games or to otherwise violate the policy.

Under current rules, for example, players can’t bet on other sports while traveling with the team. So when a player is in the team hotel the night before a Sunday game and there’s a college game that catches his interest and that he’d like to make even more interesting, he can Venmo the cash to whoever he sufficiently trusts to keep his or her mouth shut, and the player can then let them know what bet(s) to place with it.

Obviously, the safest approach would be to give the instructions by phone call and not by text. But even if a player sends a text, there’s no way the NFL would ever know about it, unless the person the player trusted ends up being not trustworthy.

It always pays to trust common sense. And common sense suggests that, in a league with a couple thousand players, someone will be doing it — and that someone has already done it. Common sense also suggests that there’s nothing the league can do about it unless and until someone decides to tattle on the player.