Mike Florio’s novel ‘Big Shield’ illustrates how a pro football gambling scandal could unfold

A calamitous gambling scandal hasn’t hit the NFL yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time. Sure, players have been caught betting on games. The most notable incident was when Calvin Ridley was suspended for the entire 2022 season for breaking the league’s policy. We shook our heads, maybe laughed, and moved on.

However, as the NFL has increasingly engaged in business with the gaming industry and with the establishment of a franchise in Las Vegas, the temptation for players has never been greater.

Mike Florio has sounded the alarm about the dangers of the NFL’s gambling partnerships. In his latest book, Big Shield, Florio tells a fictional tale of what would be a league nightmare. What if a player was providing inside information to the mob for gambling purposes? Some might dismiss that as highly unlikely. But Florio’s hypothetical isn’t far-fetched. In the imaginary world of Big Shield, a money-hungry league has a 20-game regular-season schedule and Tuesday Night Football.

Don’t laugh. NFL players from the early 1980s would have thought that the mere suggestion of a 17-game slate and Thursday Night Football was absurd.

Big Shield portrays a credible scenario because it demonstrates how an NFL gambling scandal could happen. It (likely) wouldn’t involve a starting quarterback or a major star. They are paid at the top of the scale and are too rich to risk it all. The players who would be most vulnerable would be backup quarterbacks and role players. The NFL’s active roster consists of only 53 men, and most of their contracts are not guaranteed. In a salary-cap sport, there is little security. The turnover rate is high. Teams want players who are young and cheap. That’s why the average career lasts only about 3 years.

Florio’s book tells a gambling story from the perspective of three very different people: a third-string quarterback (Carson), a mobster (Johnny), and a federal prosecutor (Alice). Florio possesses some firsthand knowledge of these realms as the founder of Pro Football Talk, his career as a lawyer, and his childhood recollections of organized crime in Wheeling, West Virginia, which led to his previous book, Father of Mine. Carson and Alice are the most true-to-life characters in Big Shield. Johnny does not appear to be as convincing and resembles a gangster stereotype.

That’s a minor criticism. How Mike Florio connects these three people is interesting. Carson is a former college star just trying to hang on in a league where the bodies are disposable. It’s easy to see how the lure of easy money from Johnny would be too much to turn down. While Carson has limited value to teams, he is immensely valuable to Johnny. Inside information in America’s most popular sport is hard-to-obtain currency. The person who would know a lot about the details before the game, such as injuries, and during the game, such as play-calling, would be someone like a third-string QB.

The drama in the book is ratcheted up when Carson meets Alice by sheer chance. That’s when all hell breaks loose. In the real world, some of the circumstances might seem hard to believe. However, according to Florio, this book is set in the not-too-distant future. What is very easy to believe is that someday someone will successfully offer an NFL player a bag of cash for inside information, to fake an injury, or worse.

When it happens, remember that Florio warned us.

Big Shield is available at Amazon.