Five Leagues Asked 35 States for Lifetime Betting Bans. The Word Doing All the Work Is "Abusively.

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Benjamin Patz sent threatening messages to four Tampa Bay Rays players and pleaded guilty in 2021 to transmitting interstate threats. Armando Bacot went under his rebound number in an NCAA tournament game and collected more than a hundred threats for it. Lance McCullers Jr. and his family got death threats from a bettor overseas. In an MLB survey cited in the leagues' own memo, 81 of 100 players said they had been harassed by bettors.

None of that is in dispute, and nobody serious is going to argue it. The five biggest American leagues and their players' associations sent a memo on Tuesday to 35 state gaming authorities — Covers counts 36; we could not reconcile the two and are using the lower figure — asking those regulators to do something about it. ESPN's Adam Schefter made it public the same day.

The ask

Three things. First, mandatory lifetime bans from legal sports betting for anyone found to have "abusively harassed or issued threats of violence" against a professional or amateur athlete, coach, official or team employee. Second, a standardised cross-operator reporting channel so leagues, teams and unions can transmit verified evidence of threats to regulators. Third — and this is the load-bearing one — that operators be required to proactively monitor, flag and ban accounts linked to abusive behaviour, with their licence on the line if they cannot.

The letter's own framing: "Threatening the safety of an athlete or their family members over a sports bet crosses a bright ethical and criminal line, and it is entirely unacceptable."

The line is bright. The letter is not.

Three words that are not a standard

Start with "abusively harassed." A lifetime ban is the most severe sanction a gaming regulator can impose on an individual — it is the same instrument states use for advantage players, for people who cheat at table games, and for those who self-exclude. The memo asks for it to attach on a finding of harassment without offering a definition of harassment, a threshold, a decision-maker, an evidentiary standard or an appeal.

That is not pedantry. The gap between "issued threats of violence" — which is already a crime in every state and in federal law, as Patz found out — and "abusively harassed," which covers a spectrum running from a credible threat down to a hostile reply to a box score, is where the entire administration of this rule lives. Somebody will have to draw the line, and the memo proposes that the party submitting the evidence be the leagues and the party imposing the penalty be a private company facing a licence risk if it under-enforces.

Ask what a rational compliance officer does under those incentives. Not a careful adjudication. A ban, promptly, on the evidence supplied, because the asymmetry is total: wrongly banning a customer costs the operator one customer, and wrongly clearing one costs it a regulatory finding.

And then note what the ban actually is, because the memo blurs it. If a sportsbook closes your account, that is a private company choosing its customers, and books already do it constantly for far less — arbitrage, bonus abuse, or simply winning. If a state regulator puts you on an exclusion list, that is the government barring you from a licensed activity across every operator in the state, and it is state action. The memo asks for the second thing while sounding like the first. Ohio, which actually has this power, got it the correct way: the legislature wrote it into the July 2023 budget bill, explicitly and narrowly, covering threats of violence or harm connected to sports gaming. West Virginia, Louisiana and Wyoming operate exclusion lists of their own. Massachusetts has run a "Bet on Respect" campaign. The tooling exists. What the memo skips is that in Ohio it took a statute, not a request.

The strongest version of the other side

Here is the objection I take most seriously, and it is not a technicality.

Due process is a real value, and it is also an argument that mostly gets deployed by people who are not receiving the threats. Athletes are being told what will happen to their children over a rebound prop. The current system — report it to the platform, hope, repeat — demonstrably does not work, and the NCAA's own message-flagging study found that betting and match-fixing abuse made up 11% of roughly 4,000 flagged messages, running at about twice the rate of racial abuse. Thirty-six percent of Division I men's basketball players told the NCAA in November 2025 they had been abused by bettors within the year. A slightly over-inclusive ban list that catches some jerks alongside the genuinely dangerous is, on this view, an acceptable price, and the people paying it lose access to a leisure product rather than anything that matters.

I think that is largely right about the urgency and wrong about the instrument. Not because the harm is overstated — it is not — but because a nationwide, permanent, cross-operator blacklist administered by thirty-five agencies on evidence from interested parties is the kind of thing that is easy to build and effectively impossible to unwind. If the leagues want the blunt version, they should ask legislatures for it in statute, with a defined standard and a hearing, the way Ohio did. Asking thirty-five regulators to bolt it onto licence conditions is the route that avoids that scrutiny, and the avoidance is the point.

The sentence that is not in the letter

Bacot's hundred threats followed a rebounds over. McCullers was pitching. The abuse in almost every documented case attaches to a player-specific outcome — a prop, or a prop inside a parlay — rather than to who won the game.

Nowhere in a memo signed by five leagues and five unions is there a request to restrict the bet type that generates it.

That is a choice. Ohio's regulators banned NCAA player props in 2024, at the request of the NCAA and with the governor behind it, on exactly this reasoning. The pro leagues took the other road: they sell official data feeds that make player props liquid, they take sponsorship money from the books that retail them, and prop inventory has expanded in every one of their sports. The memo asks regulators to police the output of that market while the leagues continue to monetise the input.

The Sports Betting Alliance's Joe Maloney says members are "investing in tools and partnerships that help identify bad actors," which is the correct answer to a question nobody asked, given that the alliance's members are the ones being asked to carry the licence risk.

What a serious version looks like

Define the conduct as threats or harassment that would independently violate state criminal law, and say so. Put the finding in front of the regulator, not the operator, with notice and an appeal. Make the cross-operator reporting channel real, funded and auditable — that part of the memo is unambiguously good and the industry should build it tomorrow. Publish the numbers annually: referrals, bans, appeals, reversals.

And then have the conversation the leagues did not open. On Wednesday, the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences published fourteen years of Ontario emergency-department data showing visits for gambling harm among men aged 10 to 29 up 154% and among men 30 to 44 up 116%, concentrated after the province opened to private online operators in April 2022. Regulators in thirty-five states have finite capacity. Some of it is about to be spent building a blacklist. It is worth being honest that this is a choice about where the capacity goes, and that the leagues asking for it have no stake in the rest of the ledger.