McKay Coppins

gambling sites, right?

In fact, I was hard-pressed to find many popular sports media outlets that were not somehow in partnership with or taking sponsorship deals from gambling platforms.

When this scandal broke and ESPN was covering it, the producers at ESPN had to scramble to take down advertisements on the screen for their own sports book.

I was surprised by the degree to which my kind of perception of organized sports, the credibility of the sports, was sort of warped by having money on the games, right?

I remember in this one particular game, it was a

Oklahoma City Thunder game and my bet lost.

And immediately I pulled up Twitter and started scrolling through to see if anybody else had the kind of similar suspicions that I had about the referees, you know, perhaps being, you know, tainted in some way or

And sure enough, there was a stream of angry gamblers saying, you know, the refs clearly had money on this game.

I'm disgusted calling on the commissioner of the NBA to resign.

And what kind of.

worried me was that, as you said, I'm not really prone to conspiracy theories.

You know, I'm a journalist.

I try to be very careful about finding evidence for the things that I believe.

But I was immediately sucked into that same kind of paranoid thinking.

And it kind of made me realize that to gamble on sports in 2026 is to almost inevitably become a

Are there athletes who are rigging this game?

Are there refs involved?

Are the coaches involved?

And every time one of these scandals is revealed, it further exacerbates those kind of conspiracy theories.

And there's actually a lot of survey data on this.