Get ready for the Super Bowl of gambling. There's a football game, too

A decade ago, one knowledgeable authority had deep reservations about the idea of the National Football League ever embracing legalized gambling. It would create a corrosive atmosphere in which every penalty or dropped pass—the normal ebbs and flows of games—“inevitably will fuel speculation, distrust, and accusations of point-shaving or game-fixing.” The moralist was none other than NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, declaring the league’s opposition to expanding sports bookmaking outside of Nevada.

- Peter Robison and Ira Boudway

The position was born, in part, out of experience. In 1946 the league learned just before the championship game that two players from the New York Giants had been offered bribes to throw the game to the Chicago Bears. (One of them was benched for the game, and both were later suspended; the Bears won, 24-14.) Since then the league had periodically been forced to suspend players whose associations with gamblers raised the existential issue of the game’s integrity. “We should not gamble with our children’s heroes,” Goodell’s predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, told Congress in 1991.

If all that sounds starchy or quaint, perhaps it’s because the league today isn’t just gambling with those heroes—it’s turning them into a kind of human inventory for an ever-expanding array of bets hyped in commercials and pumped to smartphones during every game. Since May 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ban Goodell once favored, sports betting has been legalized in more than two dozen states, plus Washington, D.C. More than 100 million Americans now live in places where they can legally wager on the Feb. 13 Super Bowl. What’s on offer isn’t just the usual bets about who will win or by how many points. Heavily marketed apps such as DraftKings and FanDuel will let Super Bowl viewers bet, during the game, on a nacho platter of options—things like whether Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow’s first pass will be complete or incomplete, which player will commit the first turnover, and what color of Gatorade will be poured on the winning coach’s head.