Tennessee Titans offensive tackle Nicholas Petit-Frere was at his team’s practice facility at some point during the 2022 season when his use of a suspended him at the start of the 2023 season.
But what if when Petit-Frere pushed the button to place the bet, it had been denied? He may not have liked it at the time, but it would have saved him a suspension and helped the NFL’s enforcement of a sports betting policy that seems to have flummoxed players and coaches. It also might have helped the Titans this year in a tough season.
“We’re very confident that we would be able to stop someone from betting before they do,” JD Garner, founder of compliance company GambleID, told Sports Handle. “We feel very confident that we can tell where they are. When we have that team’s participation, we can nail it down.”
If that all feels little Big Brotherish, well, that’s because it is. But Garner, his son Tres, and their team at GambleID are hoping to help the NFL and other professional sports leagues avoid the need to suspend players who break league betting rules or state regulations or laws.
GambleID has already identified and created profiles for many professional athletes. It is now rolling out a new service called the Athlete Response Monitor (ARM), which it says could have prevented bets from being placed by Petit-Frere or any of the other nine NFL players who have served or are serving gambling suspensions this year.
Policies are confusing 325v4g
All four major professional sports leagues in the U.S. have stringent gambling policies, and no two are the same. What sets the NFL’s apart is that it doesn’t prohibit its players from betting, but does dictate where they can bet from. Every league has a rule that bans a player from betting on his own team or league, but when the NFL suspended 10 players last summer, at least half were suspended for betting from a team facility — a rule some say they didn’t know existed.
“The betting I engaged in was NOT NFL related and was legal under Tennessee law,” Petit-Frere told ESPN at the time of his suspension. “It is only being sanctioned because it occurred at the Titans facility.”
BREAKING from NFL:
– Isaiah Rodgers & Rashod Berry of the Colts suspended indefinitely for violating the league’s gambling policy
– Nicholas Petit-Frere of Titans suspended for the team’s first 6 reg season games for betting on non-NFL sports at club facility. pic.twitter.com/o0BvKU0sv9
— Sports Handle (@sports_handle) June 29, 2023
When Denver Broncos defensive lineman Eyioma Uwazurike was suspended indefinitely in July for betting on NFL games, coach Sean Payton had some harsh words for the NFL: “When you have a bunch of players getting Ds, you have to start looking at the message,” Payton told USA Today. “And we’ve had a lot of Ds in our league this year with the policy.”
He went on to say that players should look at the gambling policy like the league’s gun policy: “You can’t bet on nothing if you’re at your facility, your hotel, your airplane. So, wherever you can’t carry a gun, you can’t place a bet. … You can’t bring a gun to the parking lot … the team hotel … to training camp … to the stadium.”
The NFL has since Massachusetts sports betting offers becoming more robust and regulations evolving quickly across states, GambleID’s real-time compliance solution is positioned to help leagues and players avoid costly infractions.
GambleID aims to make it so those violations never occur. The company has begun shopping its ARM product around U.S. professional sports leagues and says it has lots of interest from the major professional sports leagues and their associated players associations, though no contracts have been signed yet. The company’s focus is on professional sports, not college sports.
Working in concert with teams and leagues will create a whole new level of protection for leagues, teams, and players, GambleID founders said. The company is a full-service gambling compliance company that already has partnerships for everything from know-your-customer products to payment solutions with multiple gambling operators, including Thrive, SuperDraft, and Yahoo!
GambleID has been working in the gambling space for more than 20 years in which it has verified — and it says, protects — 33 million consumers.
The hope is to now bring a new level of integrity monitoring not just to sportsbooks, but directly to leagues and teams. In addition, the company hopes to flip the paradigm for professional athletes. Instead of being told what they can’t do, they would be told what they can do.
“Consumers of this are going to be people like the team, agents, the players themselves, and then also sportsbooks,” JD Garner said. “The sportsbook obviously wants to know if the kicker is going to place a bet against the team.
“We want to be seen as the overarching compliance group. The main piece is the leagues want to know who is betting and the sportsbooks want to know who is betting. A lot of these groups already get notified if someone is betting … and while you might not care if a player bets in the offseason, you do care if they are betting on game day, or the teams might not care if a player is betting $50, but they do care if it’s $1,000.”
Info used to build out athlete profiles 5x4n3z
GambleID is not the first compliance company to try to crack this particular nut.
At the start of the NFL season, U.S. Integrity in partnership with Odds on Compliance rolled out its latest integrity monitoring technology, due to privacy concerns.
So far, the UFC is the only professional league or team to have signed on. Betr, Underdog Fantasy as well as multiple major college conferences have announced deals with ProhiBet this year.
Amit Patel's lawyer says the ex-Jaguars employee who allegedly stole more than $22 million from the team suffers from a gambling addiction. @BennettConlin has the details of this sad story:https://t.co/0iCRhrxilq
— Sports Handle (@sports_handle) December 8, 2023
The founders of GambleID say they will go a step further than their competition. While GambleID already works with a sports data company to get lists of players, coaches, and others associated with professional sports teams, it is also culling data that it says is readily available from social media platforms to build out the “spheres of influence” for each person.
By doing this, GambleID is able to create an extensive list of people associated with a professional athlete, from family to former fraternity brothers to college roommates. The company can also build out profiles for anyone who could influence a game from officials to of a coaching staff.
“Take Joe Burrow, for example,” JD Garner said. “It’s pretty easy to find out who his college roommate is or his fraternity brothers, if he did that. Everyone is mapped these days, so we look to see who is following them, follow backs, Facebook friends, who they made a shout out to.”
Artificial intelligence a key component 5v653m
In addition to gathering that information, GambleID is working with the artificial intelligence company LEDR on technology that is “light years ahead of what anybody else is doing,” JD Garner said. For its ARM product, GambleID will combine AI with facial recognition and other data that it believes will ultimately allow its customers to get betting information in real time rather than weeks or months later. The end goal is to stop an improper bet before it is placed, rather than investigating bets after the fact.
The company also plans to make education a critical part of the ARM program, and leagues or players associations would be able to “offload that job to us.”
“It’s easy for team owners and leagues to say no to players and personnel — we want to turn it around and make them be able to say yes,” said Tres Garner, GambleID’s communications director. “You ask players and they didn’t know they couldn’t do it. The first part looks like monitoring, but the second part allows us to say, ‘Yes, [betting is allowed] within these boundaries.’”
Since the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act was struck down in 2018, nearly 40 states have legalized and/or allowed some sort of sports betting. In 2023, regulators in North Carolina have plans to those states in 2024. Every one of those states has a different set of regulations that must be figured into ARM to make the service effective. GambleID has created a rules engine that integrates the regulations from every jurisdiction and league, creating real-time surveillance of athletes.
Another key feature will be that instead of waiting for sportsbooks to report suspicious activity to regulators, leagues, or teams, GambleID’s ARM product will allow the leagues and teams to get information directly and on the spot. Because athlete activity is being monitored, the leagues or teams can identify potential gambling problems and intervene before a sportsbook might.
For JD Garner, GambleID and ARM offer benefits from a simple principle: Knowledge is power.
“I want to be the Neilsen ratings for gaming,” he said. “I want to know everything about them, so I can develop products around that.”
