NFL referees have made multiple game-altering calls this year that have had fans thinking some of these contests have been rigged for a certain outcome.
Fox NFL Rules analyst and NFL rules analyst and former vice president of officiating Dean Blandino shockingly acknowledged referees in the past have been “approached” about influencing games for gambling purposes.
“We’ve had situations where people were approached,” he said to Brandon Contes on the Awful Announcing Podcast. “We’ve always told our game officials because they’re in hotels—they’re traveling around during the season—we didn’t want them wearing NFL-branded gear. We didn’t want them to be inconspicuous because someone sees them and ‘Oh, those are the NFL officials,’ and then you never know.
“You don’t know who you’re gonna come across. And they know that they’re supposed to go to NFL security if something like that happens. And that has happened in the past.”
Blandino explained there are further restrictions in place for NFL referees, such as prohibiting them from entering sportsbooks. Their finances are closely watched as well.
“They look at all of your business associations. They look for conflicts of interest — all of that, bank accounts, everything. And there’s checks during the season. And so, they’ll look at if a game official has $10 in their bank account on Friday, and then they work a game, and now there’s $100,000; that’s a red flag, right?
“So, you’re checking those things. You’re monitoring the betting lines and looking at how calls impact those lines and are their individual officials that are involved in more of those calls. It’s a massive, massive undertaking. Because what the league doesn’t want and what we never wanted was a situation like what happened with the NBA, right?”
Sports will never forget the 2007 Tim Donaghy scandal in the NBA that was the last time a major American sports league experienced a situation where a referee directly bet on games they were working.
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There has not been a controversy like that for nearly 20 years, but with the increased emergence of sports betting, it feels like a situation could happen in the very near future.
