Fans joked Monday that Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Calvin Ridley made the worst bet ever conceived – wagering $1,500 and losing nearly $11 million.
That’s how much he will lose while he is suspended for the 2022 season for violating the NFL’s policy on gambling.
It’s literally the first thing they tell college and professional athletes when they walk through the door. Their freshman/rookie orientations undoubtedly cover this topic first and foremost, even before any questions about weapons, drugs or domestic incidents.
This is largely because it is far more important to the NFL to protect the integrity of its games than that of its individual players. The irony of the maintenance of that “integrity” is that they have to eliminate gambling among its own people so that everyone else can freely gamble.
Ridley is being made an example by the league just in case anyone else had designs on placing some bets on football.
The question remains as to why Ridley would use his own phone and his own name to gamble on football, when he could have easily gotten his cousin or almost anyone to do it in another state and leave him blameless.
Further – and perhaps, most alarmingly – why would he risk his career to bet $1,500? He makes millions of dollars to play football. Why tank it all for what to folks of his tax bracket is a pittance?
And there lies the scary question when it comes to gambling.
It’s the reason that sports gambling will once again likely die on the vine in the Georgia Assembly during this current session. The merry-go-round comes around every year, starting with someone riding in on a golden horse and telling us that sports gambling is an untapped source of revenue for the state of Georgia, and that we are foolish not to get on board as 30 other states and the District of Columbia have.
Then it ends up dying on the floor somewhere under the golden dome because of a contingent of representatives who strongly believe that gambling is a plague on our society.
Where Ridley plays into this is that no person in their right mind would have placed the bets that he did in his position. That can only mean he was compelled to do so by something inside him that is beyond his control.
That is what Georgia is afraid of when it comes to allowing sports gambling, which now is available at the touch of a button in the states where it has been approved.
Our representatives, for better or worse, believe that Georgians would rather be protected from themselves than reap whatever supposed tax revenue is out there. We would rather be safe here knowing that rent money, food money and clothes money for children cannot be blown on frivolous bets.
Gambling is a dangerous predator that can be as addictive as drugs and alcohol. Our legislators are smart to keep that predator on the outside of our state lines.