“We should not gamble with our children’s heroes,” Goodell’s predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, told Congress in 1991. January 2022: DraftKings Sportsbook officially takes over as the lone sports betting app in Oregon. (One of them was benched for the game, and both were later suspended the Bears won, 24-14.) Since then the league had periodically been forced to suspend players whose associations with gamblers raised the existential issue of the game’s integrity. January 2023 also produces the highest single month sports betting handle in the state’s history with 62.3 million, almost 7 million than the previous record high from October 2022. In 1946 the league learned just before the championship game that two players from the New York Giants had been offered bribes to throw the game to the Chicago Bears. The position was born, in part, out of experience. It would create a corrosive atmosphere in which every penalty or dropped pass-the normal ebbs and flows of games-“inevitably will fuel speculation, distrust, and accusations of point-shaving or game-fixing.” The moralist was none other than NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, declaring the league’s opposition to expanding sports bookmaking outside of Nevada. You win a point spread by predicting the winner of a game with the line factored into the final score. It shows each team with a (+) or (-) handicap, commonly referred to as the 'line'. A decade ago, one knowledgeable authority had deep reservations about the idea of the National Football League ever embracing legalized gambling. A point spread is a popular form of wagering on football.