From time to time in this column, I like to look at something I wrote in the past and see if it holds up to retrospective scrutiny. Early last year, after the baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani and his interpreter Ippei Mizuhara were ensnared in a major gambling scandal that ended with Mizuhara in jail, I wrote a column titled “Online Gambling Is Changing Sports for the Worse,” in which I expressed concern for the “integrity of the game,” and worried that betting by athletes and others around them—Ohtani himself denied any involvement and was never charged with anything—might begin occurring with such frequency that it would cause the public, including children, to lose faith in what they were watching.

During the past two weeks, that view, or something like it, has been expressed in many corners—mostly in response to an F.B.I. investigation into N.B.A. players and coaches. An Opinion piece in the Times declared “Gambling Is Killing Sports and Consuming America,” and argued that “fandom” has become “an afterthought, not just to casual viewers but also the leagues themselves.”

As someone who has written quite a bit on the topic over the years, and has tried to keep an open mind as apps such as DraftKings and FanDuel have made their way across the country, I’ve come up with a list of three reminders to consider before passing judgment on whatever the latest scandal might be.

1. People, including athletes, have always bet on sports. It isn’t the healthiest activity; like alcohol, drug use, and stock trading, it can lead people to ruin. But it will take a while to sort out whether we are seeing a new epidemic of betting or if the people who used to bet illegally are just doing it in the open now, where they can be counted. (In February, a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found a strong correlation between sportsbooks opening in new states and an increase in people in those states searching online for help with a gambling addiction. But a recent Pew poll found only modest growth during the past three years in the percentage of people who said they had bet on sports during the previous twelve months.)
2. Legal sports betting generates a considerable amount of tax revenue. To operate in New York, for example, licensed betting apps have to pay fifty-one per cent of their revenue to the state. The value of this should be considered when weighing any downsides of legalized betting.
3. The people who write and talk about sports for a living are inclined to freak out about sports betting, in part because they, much more than the average sports fan, like to wax rhapsodic about American innocence and the integrity of the game. Most fans, in my experience, either assume the games have always been fixed or don’t really care either way.

As sports-betting apps have spread, there has been a definite uptick in public gambling scandals involving athletes. In many of these cases, individual players have got caught by highly sensitive algorithms put in place by the betting companies to detect unusual activity. If, for example, a large amount of money comes in on a bet on an obscure player, the companies will flag it, and see if it matches up with any other betting patterns surrounding that player. This is reportedly how Jontay Porter, an N.B.A. role player, was caught in an honestly comical scheme, which involved an online boiler room of sports bettors, whom he would tip off about his intent to fake an injury while playing. And so consider the first reminder above. In prior eras, the athletes would have placed bets with an illegal bookie—who might even have refused their action because they would have been suspicious, themselves, of corruption. They might also bet in an offshore account that is actually disincentivized to share its customer information with the federal government. Does this uptick, then, reflect a significant increase in athletes betting, or are there just more people getting caught now? The answer isn’t obvious.

Many of the infractions that have come to light have been relatively minor: players unknowingly breaking their leagues’ sports-gambling rules, or placing bets on games they weren’t involved in, for example. In addition to Porter, Calvin Ridley, an N.F.L. wide receiver, was suspended for a year for reportedly betting several thousand dollars on N.F.L. games while he was on leave from the Atlanta Falcons; Tucupita Marcano, a utility player for the San Diego Padres and the Pittsburgh Pirates, received a lifetime ban from Major League Baseball for betting on his own team while recovering from surgery. But, given the ubiquity of online gambling, the sensitivity of the detection programs, and the very real information these players could capitalize on, the list of players known to have bet on themselves or their own teams remains short. Terry Rozier, a guard for the Miami Heat, who was arrested as part of the F.B.I.’s investigation two weeks ago, might now join that list; he has been publicly linked with a gambling probe for the better part of a year. (Rozier has denied any wrongdoing.) Damon Jones, another figure targeted by the investigation, hasn’t played in the N.B.A. in more than a decade. Much of the case appears to be focussed on the Portland Trail Blazers head coach, Chauncey Billups, and the allegations that he was involved in rigged poker games, which have nothing to do with outcomes on an N.B.A. court. (Billups has also denied the charges.)

That story got a great deal of attention, but I’m not sure all of the actual details of the case measure up to the size of the panic being kicked up by the media. Jones has been accused of leaking insider information about his friend LeBron James’s availability before games—although that’s certainly concerning, it doesn’t actually affect the outcome of games. You could say that the integrity of legal sports betting is threatened by such leaks; the integrity of sports less so.

Perhaps there’s a lot we don’t know happening in the dark; additional revelations could change my perspective. But, given the fanfare with which the F.B.I. presented the cases against Billups and Rozier, it’s hard to imagine that some epidemic of point shaving is going on. The most likely scenario might be that, yes, a few more athletes than before, perhaps especially those who are in financial trouble, are turning to sports betting as a way to generate a modest amount of extra income—or, in some instances, to work off their own gambling debt. Looking over the landscape now, I find I am less concerned than I was eighteen months ago, not more.

In that earlier column, I noted my resistance to grandiose moralizing before confessing that I was becoming genuinely worried about how all the new gambling talk might affect children and their enjoyment of the game. Of all the arguments advanced to regulate and restrict the new apps, “think of the children” is the most common—and, I now have to admit, as a parent of two young children, the silliest.

One of the more full-throated versions of this case was made in December, by the Washington Post, which published an editorial titled “For a New Generation of Kids, Sports and Gambling Now Go Hand in Glove.” The piece described the current state of affairs like so:

For decades, professional sports considered gambling taboo. But now, with 38 states and D.C. allowing legal betting on games, the ubiquity of sports betting advertisements, and lucrative tie-ups between professional teams and gambling companies, a generation of young people has grown up with gambling as a normal—even integral—part of spectator sports, one which, according to the impression that ads create, is an easy money, no-lose proposition.

But is this actually true? I thought about it after watching Game Seven of the World Series, last Saturday. Were any of the kids who stayed up to see Yoshinobu Yamamoto heroically close out the series thinking about prop bets or the over/under? I was watching while chatting online with a group of dudes with whom I’ve played fantasy sports—itself a modest form of sports gambling—for the better part of two decades. Everyone in the group has bet on sports for their entire adult lives. Outside of a few ironic comments, there was effectively no talk about bets or spreads or parlays throughout the entire eleven innings. After the game ended, we argued about whether we had witnessed the greatest World Series game of all time. If this group of hardened degenerates was able to enjoy the action at this level, who, exactly, are the spiritual victims of sports betting? Who has had their fandom stripped away? What is “fandom,” anyway?

I have begun to suspect that much of the moralizing about children must come from people who don’t have any—or who, at the very least, do not take them to many sporting events. In the past year, my eight-year-old daughter has attended a variety of collegiate and professional contests and watched many more on television, and she has never once asked about DraftKings or why the commentators are talking about moneyline odds. If she did, I would explain that all of that was for adults, which is also what I would say if she asked about the ads for erectile-dysfunction medication that appear between innings.

This leads me to a final question: Do we really want to sanitize sports into some childish endeavor that exemplifies all the innocent wonderment found within the spirit of human beings, or whatever? In the past few years, a handful of former N.F.L. players have died at a startlingly young age. Demaryius Thomas, Vincent Jackson, Marion Barber, and Doug Martin were all in their thirties when they died, and all of them were struggling with depression or other severe mental-health issues that were very possibly related to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.). Meanwhile, the N.B.A., which once loudly proclaimed its commitment to social justice, has developed a robust financial partnership with the United Arab Emirates, a country that is sending weapons to further the brutal massacre in Sudan. These issues concern me far more than a handful of players gambling on games they weren’t playing in. I would probably have a hard time explaining to my child why Peyton Manning was nearly in tears at Thomas’s posthumous induction into the Denver Broncos’ Ring of Fame. And I also would not want to tell her why her favorite hoopers were competing in a meaningless in-season tournament funded by the U.A.E.

This isn’t an attempt at cheap whataboutism—and it certainly doesn’t mean that gambling isn’t a problem. Nor does it mean that harsh punishments shouldn’t be doled out to players who bet on their own games. Rather, what it means, to me, is that we abandon moralizing mythmaking around professional and collegiate sports altogether. We shouldn’t lie to preserve abstract ideas such as fandom and integrity, nor should we pretend that the first bet on a football game happened on an iPhone. Professional sports are rapacious for-profit enterprises that produce wildly entertaining, sometimes violent, and sometimes inspiring athletic competition. Isn’t that enough? ♦