Sunday’s Super Bowl concluded another season of wagering on the sport made great by gambling. With billions wagered legally— and billions wagered illegally—the NFL is a Frankenstein of the betting industry. Everything is done to create parity while simultaneously promoting chaos. When other leagues talk about success they are talking about the NFL’s colossal gambling industry.

The penetration of betting has only increased with legalization in Canada (Ontario is the only “open” legal market at the moment) and the United States (38 states currently allow sports wagering). It has gotten to the point where sports bettors in Las Vegas, for decades the only legal spot for sports gambling, complain that Nevada is falling behind its neighbours. Some drive across state lines to wager on sports offerings not made in Vegas.

We could do a small book on all the new betting applications that have sprung up with sharps applying stock-market analytics and trading strategies to break down a football game. But for today we’ll concentrate on the device that has turbo-charged public betting in the past generation: Proposition bets. And the enormous risk they bring.

In the bad old days when gambling was underground, dominated by organized crime, football betting meant the money line (who will win), sides (by how many points) and totals (how many points would be scored in as game). The range of options within these parameters was limited. You could parlay (two bets), tease (two or more choices with alternate odds) or do future bets.

Then along came proposition bets (props). There are propositions on everything from how many yards player X will run for, how many interceptions Player Y will throw and how many touchdowns player Z will score. There are also team props. The range of props covers almost any result generated by a football game— and a few generated by halftime shows and coin flips.

When props first began to catch the public interest, they were a novelty. Snobs saw them as sucker bets for squares. In Vegas, books would stage a glitzy launch ten days before the game to announce their props. No more. The first props for SB LIX were out minutes after the conference final games were decided. The brushfire is now a conflagration.

The two weeks before SB LIX were saturated with experts breaking down the teams, their predilections and their models for predicting prop winners. In a game with no appreciable favourite this meant every microchip of data being examined. (We had at least a dozen props then added a couple more during the game to hedge against any losers.)

The great fallibility of prop betting is their individual nature. With totals and sides the results are determined by efforts of the 92 NFL players allowed to suit up each week. Outside of the QBs, kickers, coaches and perhaps the referees, no single person could determine a W or L. Not so with props.

A player can drop a pass or miss a tackle— affecting his prop— without anyone being the wiser. The NFL scrutinizes players for erratic patterns, but on a single basis anything is possible for a player who is being influenced by bettors. Integrity of the product is paramount for the NFL and its gambling partners. So a rogue player is like a communist in Joe McCarthy’s America.

There is also betting on non-football props concerning length of national anthem, colour of Gatorade used to douse the winning coach and clothing choices of the halftime performers. Here, bettors are truly on their own as the NFL has no control on Kendrick Lamar’s playlist. (Considering KL’s associates “in the hood” this a very Wild West way to lose money) own the colour of Gatorade used (yellow).

So far the NFL has avoided any public gambling scandal like the one that landed  the personal translator for Dodgers’s star Hideki Ohtani in jail for tipping off  gamblers. (So far MLB has managed to wall off Hideki from the crimes). But the possibilities are there in NFL and other sports where a player compromised by debts, drug issues or sexual activity can be leveraged for profit.

The league with the most visible prop problem is the NBA with its small rosters (15 players game day). For a reminder the NBA was forced to admit that there is a current police probe into player Terry Rozier, now of the Miami Heat. “In March 2023, the NBA was alerted to unusual betting activity related to Terry Rozier’s performance in a game between Charlotte and New Orleans,” NBA spokesman said. While the NBA has cleared Rozier police area not satisfied.

In the 2023 matchup between the Hornets and the New Orleans Rozier pulled himself from the game after just nine minutes. As a result Rozier finished well below his prop bet of 32.5 combined points, assists and rebounds. Bettors howled about the suspicious nature of Rozier’s exit with a foot problem.

What made cops suspicious was that the network of gamblers placing money on Rozier was the same network that had allegedly manipulated former Raptor Jontay Porter’s prop numbers. Porter has been banned for life over charges he shaved numbers for the nefarious characters cited in the rosier story. Police are still investigating him.

The NBA is still reverberating from the 2007 scandal of referee Tim Donaghy who used his knowledge of the NBA to bet on professional basketball games and tip off crimes figures. He was banned for life and sentenced to 15 months in prison. Now released from prison Donaghy continues to warn about the vulnerability of betting NBA games.

Then there is the risk associated with U.S. college athletics now that players are paid to attend a certain college. Money and temptation flow freely in the new portal system that allows players to transfer schools midway through their eligibility.

Sunday’s game produced a one-sided windfall for Eagles’ bettors and the usual controversial referee calls did not affect the outcome. But it should not be seen as a reason to be less vigilant, particularly with props.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

The hysteria was mint this past weekend from panicky Canadians acting as if Donald Trump’s tariffs were a Pearl Harbor sneak-attack. They booed the Star Spangled Banner at sporting events, had conniption fits of self pity (‘we’ve been friends for so long!”) and generally acted like fainting goats by forgoing U.S. sun holidays.

Whatever the merits of Trump’s beefs the indignant reaction revealed a very unsettled nation. Punishing America by pulling wines you’ve already paid for off the shelves is baffling. Cancelling a Star Link contract with Elon Musk is just a self goal. (A chastened Musk replied, “Oh well!”) Alberta premier Danielle Smith, who’d used negotiating to get a cutout for Canadian oil, being roundly called a vendu by the righteous Eastern horde was precious.

Charter members of the crumbling legacy media outdid themselves in promoting Trudeau’s fanciful Team Canada theme. “This is a mind poisoned with grievance and resentment,” raged CBC panelist Andrew Coyne. “So coked up on his own bile that even in a moment of maximum national peril his first thought is how to use it to settle scores with the rest of the country.”

Well then. It was all rather unseemly. Noted Dilbert creator Scott Adams, “Canada’s response to Trump’s tariffs is to be publicly sad about it.” But are Trump’s concerns genuine? Is he picking unfairly on a longtime pal? The fact is that Trump is holding a mirror to a postmodern Canadian state that still thinks it’s Bob & Doug McKenzie and polite folk opening the door. Maybe it was at one time, but since Justin Trudeau spread his chocolatey goodness on the nation it’s now a world centre for money laundering that won’t pay its defence obligations.

Example: TD Bank was just fined $3B by US regulators for laundering fentanyl drug money back to Communist China. It’s the largest such fine in U.S. history.  A fine TD paid without complaint. Trudeau’s Canada is a credit-bubble real estate play inside a WEF construct wrapped up in an entitled clique that sits in first class but only pays economy. (And don’t get us started on the unsolved Sherman murders.)

Having gotten their news from CBC and Toronto Star, the average CDN does not understand any of this. While the Libs/ NDP swoon over climate and pronouns, Canada has become a place that Trump and other nations simply don’t trust. Security officials fear that anything said to Trudeau’s government will end up getting to China or other bad actors. And many of those same bad actors are domiciled in Canada at the moment. (The RCMP say there are over 4,000 separate groups dealing drugs in Canada.)

Canada’s exclusion from surveillance organizations like AUKUS and the G7 Quint talks is enough to tell you that Trump is not alone in distrusting Canada. Under the previous Obama doctrine, Canada was cool so long as it did DEI, ESG and had kittens over climate. Biden let the Great White North snooze away under Trudeau. The new American administration, however, has a higher bar of expectations.

Ones Trudeaupia has not met. How do you describe America’s sense of astonishment when it asked its “loyal friend” Canada not to import 5,000 undocumented Gazans during this current shooting war, not wanting terrorist sympathizers along its northern border. Then, out of spite, Trudeau’s response was to bring them in, give them healthcare and do photo ops with them?

Trudeau has also lectured Americans for electing Trump and not a woman in 2024. No wonder Trump played them last weekend about their lax border security. One of the “brilliant” ripostes on borders — repeated by all the clever people— was that only one percent of America’s fentanyl comes from Canada. For those who think that’s a mic-drop moment consider: that’s fentanyl seized by America at the border.

Here, Canada’s international crime agency destroys the one-percent argument. Canada is a major manufacturer and distributor of fentanyl. How major? There is a technique used by international drug and money launderers called the Vancouver Model.

As a recent discovery of 8 Kg during a truck stop in Swift Current illustrates, the amounts undiscovered in Canada and the U.S. that originate from shipments to Montreal or Vancouver are way more than the CDN media parroted over the weekend. For those booing the Star Spangled Banner, note that 8 kg. is enough for four million deadly doses of fentanyl. (B.C. NDP premier David Eby had to confess he can’t even begin to inspect all the drugs flowing through Vancouver).

This story of a Punjabi driver arrested in Manitoba with $50M in meth in his truck gives you the flavour. Last month, Toronto police seized 835kg from a truck and stash houses across the city. And, say experts, there are more terror suspects coming from Canada to America than from Mexico. Now tell us why the unchecked importation, distribution and profits from the drugs are not significant in a trade deal.

Speaking of truckers, Canada’s explosion in newly arrived cross-border truck drivers is another huge issue for Americans. As Toronto business writer Stephen Punwasi @stephenpunwasi explains a good portion of the “students” coming into the nation are getting a very different education on life in Canada. “Canada had no checks or balances for its study program. No background checks or school verification. Just show up at the airport w/ proof of funds, and a letter they won’t verify. That’s it. ” These “graduates” quickly end up in a rig running contraband drugs, guns and tech to supplement their minuscule earnings.

“Between 2017 & 2024, Ontario went from 80 truck driving schools to 280. The province has 6 auditors for 600 private career colleges—almost half for trucks, apparently. No enforcement standards.

“To recap,” continues Punwasi:

• “money laundering capital of the world

• – no school regulations

• – criminals run certifications

• – desperate folks from developing countries w/no standard of entry

• – no scrutiny for x-border traffic”

Canadian trucking executives know the problem in the industry. They say new entrants make no money trucking, but they do make for easy “‘runners’. It is rampant. One executive says his firm has virtually exited the cross-border business, because of the changing demographics. These truckers— many of them speaking no English— are housed in suburban neighbourhoods in Brampton or Mississauga or Surrey, stacked by the dozens in barracks homes in between their sorties to the U.S. and the ROC. Attempts to restore local zoning laws are fought by the ringleaders.

But hey, says CBC, Trump exaggerates the problem. He’s also contemptuous of the current attempt to slide climate alarmist Mark Carney into Trudeau’s seat. The dread of being lectured by a CBC-approved suit like Carney is only leavened by the prospect that he can deal with Pierre Poilievre when— if— the Liberals ever let Canadians voice their will. This is what Canada’s Left call progress. Save the tundra and the Arctic swallow but crater the economy.

A final feature of the pearl clutching this past weekend was the idea that Trump would somehow invade or otherwise claim Canada as a 51st state. Canadians seem to feel that Trump’s job is to pacify their feelings, not act on behalf of those Americans who decisively elected him and his mandate. Like victims of a high school break-up Canadian progressives are now tearing up all the letters and sending back the jewelry from their tryst. Memo to Canada: Being U.S. president is not joining a book club. As such you don’t elect a trust-fund poseur.

Whatever Trump’s jest, the last thing he wants is the culture nightmare of Quebec, the vast land claims of the native tribes, the welfare status of the Maritimes and the unbearable smugness of the Flora MacDonald Marching Band in Ontario. If Canada or Canadians are to join America it will be because they’ve asked in, not be captured. Trump would dictate the terms, and he doesn’t want a dozen new Mississippis, especially ones with poutine.

For now, the 30-day pause in tariffs allows time to drop the theatrics and get on with the reality of an economy that will consume Canada’s economy at the present rate. By week’s end even Trump’s vitriolic critics like the Globe&Mail were offering backhanded acknowledgements that, however crude they found the president’s tactics, he did wake up Canadians to the issue of Canada’s lassitude on defence and the border. Doomberg summed up the conflict. “The economic wisdom of applying tariffs is worthy of debate, but the threat of tariffs has proved the perfect instrument for the task. Having weighed 250 daily American deaths on the scale of trade-offs, Trump’s actions have finally acknowledged reality. Godspeed’.”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.