The NFL suspended four players, including two now ex-Colts, for betting on NFL games yesterday, three indefinitely and the fourth (Titans offensive tackle Nicholas Petit-Frere) for six games for betting on sports other than football.
In related news, irony breathed its last.
It died in an assisted living facility next to the Never Felt Younger Health Spa, where it had been in ill health since Donald Trump started waving a Bible around. It had taken a turn for the worse when Clarence Thomas, a black man whom affirmative action helped get a leg up, ruled to ban such legs up for any future black man or woman.
"Too late, suckers!" Justice Thomas crowed, pulling the ladder up behind him.
(OK, so he didn't. But he might as well have.)
In any case, the final blow was the NFL banishing four players for doing what it enthusiastically encourages America to do. That's because it gets paid a chunk by several online betting sites to do just that.
This went directly against everything the NFL had stood for since Paul Hornung and Alex Karras got dinged for betting on NFL games. But money talks loudest in today's America, so now there's an NFL team in Las Vegas and commissioner Roger Goodell might as well be Bugsy Siegel.
What's resulted is a scandal-in-embryo, and the league has no one but itself to blame. What you endorse often ends up defining you, after all. And so when you move to correct it you only sound hypocritical and silly.
Oh, you can roll out all the high-minded sanctimony you want about how the "integrity of the game is of the utmost importance" (Indianapolis Colts GM Chris Ballard), but how is anyone supposed to take you seriously? How do we not just burst out laughing?
Which I did, by the way, when I read Ballard's quote.
And then waited for the inevitable DraftKings ad.
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