Gambling Cost Alabama’s Coach His Job. What Might it Cost Baseball?

On Thursday, the University of Alabama abruptly fired head baseball coach Brad Bohannon for his involvement in a pair of suspicious bets involving the Crimson Tide’s game against LSU last Friday. That night, a bettor at the sportsbook at Great American Ball Park — home of the Reds — placed two suspiciously large bets on LSU to win, large enough to draw the attention of U.S. Integrity, the company retained by the Ohio Casino Control Commission and the Southeastern Conference to monitor sports wagering in the state’s casinos.

On Monday, the OCCC instructed Ohio bookmakers to take Crimson Tide games off the board. Regulators in other states followed suit, as have several major online sportsbooks. And in the wake of Bohannon’s firing three days later, ESPN reporter David Purdum revealed that surveillance cameras within the sportsbook had recorded the suspicious bettor communicating with Bohannon at the time he was placing the bets in question.

The substance of the conversation between the bettor and Bohannon has not yet been made public, but it’s reasonable to assume it concerned Alabama’s starting pitcher that night. An hour before the start of last Friday’s game, Bohannon scratched starter Luke Holman, who suffered a minor back injury, and replaced him with Hagan Banks. Presumably the bettor got this information before the public and wagered accordingly.

This constitutes the first major gambling scandal in American baseball since the Supreme Court struck down the ban on single-game betting in 2018. Even what little we know now about the situation leaves plenty to unpack.

The biggest mysteries remaining, at least to me, are the bettor’s relationship to Bohannon and the coach’s motives for sharing inside information with him. Bohannon would have known about the NCAA’s zero-tolerance policy on sports gambling by coaches and athletes; communicating with a gambler under those circumstances would’ve represented an immense risk, particularly if that gambler were careless enough to set off regulatory red flags. (More on the wisdom of this particular wager later.)

And this might matter, or it might not, but Bohannon was in a precarious position to begin with. He had been Alabama’s head coach since 2018; in four full seasons (not counting the current season or the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign), he never finished better than 12–17 in the SEC and never won more than 32 games overall. The program is treading water at a bad time: the SEC West is a tougher division than the AL Central right now and will only become more so when Texas and Oklahoma join the conference in two years. Bohannon, pitching coach Jason Jackson (now interim head coach after Bohannon’s firing), and athletic trainer Sean Stryker are also being sued by Johnny Blake Bennett, a former Alabama pitcher who claims the team mishandled his recovery from thoracic outlet syndrome.

All of this is not to claim, or even imply, that the gambling racket is a sham made up by the university so it can fire Bohannon for cause and avoid paying a buyout. If the Ohio state government is involved, you can be pretty sure the case is legit. Rather, Bohannon was not in a position where anyone above him on the food chain at Alabama would be particularly inclined to stick their neck out to protect him.

Not that anyone could have helped Bohannon once the surveillance video linked him to the suspicious bettor. If his intention were to communicate the late starting pitching change for gambling purposes, he was either betting on his own team to lose or encouraging someone else to do so. If there’s a graduated scale of sins of sports betting, betting on your team to lose is one of the worst.

The popularity of sports — the integrity of sports, if we want to use that language — depends on all competitors making an earnest effort to win. If two people are pulling on opposite ends of a rope and one lets go, both fall down. This is why tanking bothers people so much. It’s why, in my view, a competitor betting on the sport is categorically worse than a competitor cheating. Cheating, whether through PEDs or electronic sign-stealing or ball-doctoring, might throw the tug-of-war out of balance, but because the forces are all still pulling in the direction they’re supposed to, it doesn’t cause the game to collapse.

You could make the argument that this incident proves the system works. Regulators picked up on the suspicious bets almost immediately and traced the bettor back to Bohannon within a week. If this had been going on at an illegal underground sportsbook, we might never have been any the wiser. For all we know, college baseball coaches have been communicating information to bookies for years, and this is just the first time anyone’s gotten caught. Nobody was even looking for Tim Donaghy when he showed up as bycatch in an FBI organized crime dragnet. By putting gambling out in the open, the government can monitor it and make sure everything is on the level. Because that’s the proposition of legalized gambling: the odds might be stacked in the house’s favor, but players know what the odds are going in. Anything else is a shell game.

Introducing legal gambling to sports takes the fundamental proposition of the game — all sides must compete to win — and reinforces it. Not only are people investing in the outcome of a game emotionally, but they’re also investing financially. You can’t refund hurt feelings after a loss, but you can refund lost winnings.

Not only does the sport have to be legitimate, then; it also has to look legitimate. That renders meaningless Donaghy’s protestations that he never threw a game, merely that he passed on tips to gamblers. It renders meaningless Pete Rose’s defense that he only ever bet on his team to win; there were games when he didn’t bet on his team, and his closeness with illegal bookmakers left him susceptible to coercion. That’s why Bohannon’s punishment was so severe and so immediate. If the integrity of the sport comes into question, the sport will not survive for long.

It’s worth repeating, though, that the bet that set off this whole rigmarole was placed from inside an MLB stadium. By partnering with sportsbooks, MLB has invited gambling into the tent. Once inside, betting gets into everything.

The range of opinions about baseball’s embrace of gambling runs the gamut, and it seems like most people who have an opinion on the matter hold it strongly. There are avid bettors who’ll watch baseball less for its own sake than as an opportunity to make a quick buck or experience the thrill of the action. There are others who oppose gambling on moral or aesthetic grounds, or resent the pervasiveness of gambling content and advertising in an arena that was devoid of same just five years ago.

Personally, I’m ambivalent on the issue. I don’t bet on sports, but more because it doesn’t interest me than because of any hard-and-fast moral objection. Particularly in baseball; you have to be out of your mind to bet on a single regular-season baseball game.

That’s what gets me about the bets that got Bohannon in trouble. How much could that information have really helped? LSU has held the No. 1 national ranking all season — nearly as long as any team in history. The Tigers would’ve been huge favorites no matter who Alabama started; Holman’s injury couldn’t have moved the odds that much. And even after he got hurt and LSU jumped out to an 8–1 lead, Alabama staged a late rally and almost came back to win anyway. You can’t, as they say, predict baseball.

Still, we all have our frivolous expenditures, and this seems as good a way as any to have fun while losing money. And sure, gambling-centered content can be off-putting to people who are just there to watch the game, but it’s not difficult to put together a radio segment or a TV graphic that’s useful to gamblers and interesting, or at least not offensive, to non-gamblers. It is what it is, and MLB has far more objectionable ways of making a buck.

But gambling increases the pressure on the league to confirm the legitimacy of its product. It invites scrutiny on topics that are imperceptible to the casual observer, like minute differences in how the baseball behaves, or the probity of officials, or the timing of last-minute pitching changes. (Holman is fine, by the way; he went seven innings in an 11–2 win over Vanderbilt hours after his coach was fired.) There’s no such thing as an innocent coincidence when there’s gambling money on the line.

At the same time, and perversely, gambling invites bad actors within the game to take actions that would undermine that integrity — for instance, a coach giving out information that would persuade a bettor to place a large wager against his team. It could also invite bad actors outside the game to exert pressure on players, coaches, and officials to divulge privileged information or even throw games. The NCAA’s no-gambling policy might seem harsh, and the NFL’s recent slate of gambling suspensions might seem draconian. But these measures are necessary. When the mere appearance of impropriety could pose an existential threat to the league, there is no paint too bright for the uncrossable line. Because once gambling is in, it’s everywhere. It can only be monitored and regulated, but never completely controlled.