Las Vegas beat the odds to land the Super Bowl in 2024

The most improbable trajectory in football this week has nothing to do with how Kansas City or San Francisco has reached the Super Bowl.

It’s how the Super Bowl has reached Las Vegas.

It’s how the biggest spectacle in American sports has found its way to the warm neon embrace of the most proudly salacious street in the country.

How the once staunchly puritanical league that until very recently saw sports gambling as a most dangerous taboo and a threat to its very existence has not only learned to co-exist with the newly legalized vice but, naturally, to co-profit from it.

Twenty years ago, the NFL declined to run a Super Bowl commercial for Las Vegas tourism because it was too close to a tacit endorsement of gambling. On Sunday, Feb. 11, a champion will be crowned in a stadium that stands at the intersection of Dean Martin Drive and Al Davis Way, quite literally the crossroad of Sin City and professional football.

It will be the culmination of what NFL executive vice president Jeff Miller just this past week called the league’s “evolving position” toward a city long synonymous with everything it once fought against . . . but now partners with.

In the film classic “Casablanca,” police Capt. Louis Renault was “Shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here” in Rick’s Café Américain. After decades observing its deliberate distancing, current observers should be equally bewildered to find that football is going on here in Las Vegas.

Recalling his 1970s and ’80s battles with the NFL regarding mere suggestions on television that wagering on the sport existed, former broadcaster and long-time Las Vegas resident Brent Musburger is firmly among the flabbergasted.

“I would not have believed back in the day if you had said to me, ‘Brent, the CBS gang is going to come to Las Vegas for Super Bowl LVIII,’ ” Musburger said on a conference call this past week. “I would have laughed out loud back then. But how times have changed.”

In this decade alone, the NFL already has approved and overseen the move of one of its franchises to Las Vegas, already held its Pro Bowl in Las Vegas (twice!), and already held its draft in Las Vegas. Now it is going all the way with this Mecca of Immorality by bringing its glitziest and most prized event to a town it used to shun as too toxic and bacchanalian.

“I think there is a pretty comfortable appreciation for Las Vegas,” Miller said on a conference call this past week. “While Las Vegas is a symbol, because it has had sports gambling for quite some time, it’s also a very sophisticated city and a mature city as it relates to engagement with the NFL and other sports that, at this point, makes us very comfortable playing a game there.”

The NFL has had a long and complicated relationship with gambling that goes back nearly to its origins. Two of the most respected and well-regarded families of the league, the Maras (who own half of the Giants) and the Rooneys (who own the Steelers), made the money they eventually invested into their teams in the 1920s and ’30s through gambling. Just six years after the 1919 Black Sox scandal rocked baseball, the NFL gladly accepted the $500 charter fee from Tim Mara, who made his money legally running numbers, to establish what would become a marquee franchise in New York.

“It was a completely different era then,” John Mara, Tim’s grandson and current president and CEO of the Giants, told The New York Times a few years ago. “The founding fathers were gamblers. They bought into teams for a song and came close to going broke week after week.”

Morality and outrage regarding gambling quickly changed, however, and soon it was more a scourge than a resource. In 1963, the NFL dealt suspensions to two of its biggest stars for betting on its games. Paul Hornung of the Packers and Alex Karras of the Lions were banned “indefinitely” for wagers (between $50 and $200) and associating with “known hoodlums.” They were reinstated a year later. Both are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Just six months after he helped beat the Colts in a game he guaranteed the Jets would win, galvanized the merger between the AFL and NFL, and nudged the Super Bowl from a sideshow to a main event, Joe Namath briefly retired from football because of gambling.

The Jets quarterback had opened a Manhattan bar called Bachelors III, but the league didn’t like the kind of clientele it was attracting. Commissioner Pete Rozelle threatened Namath with suspension, citing clauses in his contract for entering “drinking or gambling establishments” or associating with “notorious persons.” So Namath, with tears in his eyes during a news conference in the summer of 1969, chose the club over the sport.

“I’m not selling,” Namath said then. “I quit!”

Eventually, grudgingly, he sold his share of the establishment and returned to his budding Hall of Fame career in time to participate in the upcoming season. The line, though, had been drawn with thick marker between the two pastimes of gambling and football.

It remained that way for most of the rest of the 20th century, and even during very recent times. The NFL invested heavily in efforts to combat the legalization of gambling to the point that commissioner Roger Goodell warned in 2012: “If gambling is permitted freely on sporting events, normal incidents of the game such as bad snaps, dropped passes, turnovers, penalties and play- calling inevitably will fuel speculation, distrust and accusations of point-shaving or game-fixing.”

In 2015 the league even slammed its foot down when Tony Romo and about 100 other active players planned to participate in a fantasy football convention in Las Vegas during the offseason. The league threatened them with fines and suspensions for violating the policy that prohibited them from taking part in such events in a casino. The convention was canceled.

Now Romo will be in the CBS broadcast booth just off the Vegas Strip calling the action for the biggest game of the year for what might be — depending on who else decides to show up following a concert in Japan the night before — the sport’s widest-ranging viewership audience of all time.

So what happened? How did the NFL go from mounting a War on Wagering to this moment?

It began when the league and others lost the legal fight in 2018. That’s when the United States Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), a 1992 federal law that had banned commercial sports betting in most states (Nevada was an exception) and opened the door to its wide legalization. The NFL was a plaintiff in that case. Today 38 states plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia allow it.

The NFL determined it was better to join forces with the powers that ran those pursuits than to try to ignore them. It gave them some sense of control. It also gave them money. In 2021, in what may be the greatest “if you can’t beat ’em” turnaround in sports history, it was announced that Caesars Entertainment, DraftKings and FanDuel had become “official sports betting partners of the NFL.”

Later that same year, the NFL announced that Super Bowl LVIII, originally planned to be played in New Orleans, would be awarded to Las Vegas instead. (The expansion of the regular season from 16 to 17 games pushed the date of the game into conflict with Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans, which will host next year’s game instead).

Which brings us to this week. To the NFL’s sacred images, its shield and the Lombardi Trophy, being splashed on the high rises along Las Vegas Boulevard. To the laser shows and gigantic LED displays and water spectacles that will take place touting the full consummation of the once-forbidden relationship between a sport and a city that together, in many ways, symbolize a nation. And perhaps even to the biggest pop star in the world dropping in to cheer for her boyfriend while potentially overshadowing almost all of it.

There still are policies that will be enforced to keep the two entities (no, not Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift) at something of a distance. The NFL and its one-time bane now may be cozy enough to share this Super Bowl, but there are still his and hers bath towels that represent boundaries that can’t be crossed.

“The rules are no different for the participating teams’ players and other personnel as they would be for any other game,” Miller said. “When on business, there is no gambling, whether it be sports gambling or otherwise. Any player, coach, personnel — including yours truly — who would be caught or identified gambling at a casino would be eligible for the disciplinary process.”

So no, there won’t be NFL players lined up around and doubling down at blackjack tables. You won’t find coaches, officers or any of the 17,000 or so people who fall under the NFL’s policies on such matters scanning the over-unders or prop bets for the big game.

At least you shouldn’t. And no one associated with the NFL is allowed to gamble on football.

The NFL sent a memo to its clubs late this past week reminding all non-player personnel about its gambling policy, which prohibits betting on the NFL or any other sport as well as simply entering a sportsbook for any reason during the NFL season.

“It’s the same as it is in any other game in any other situation,” Miller said, downplaying any unique challenges of enforcing such rules in a town that so blatantly and wantonly ignores them. “It is making sure we are doing everything we can to protect the integrity of the game.”

That used to be done by avoiding Vegas at all costs. Now, though, with the aid of legislative changes, financial incentives and the undying allure of those forever-flashing lights that have turned even the mighty NFL into moths, it will be done smack in the middle of Vegas.

Kansas City could win the Super Bowl on Sunday. San Francisco has a good chance to win it, too. But the fact that the Super Bowl is happening where it is being staged proves the everlasting axiom of Vegas is as strong now as it has been throughout its long, often sordid, never dull history.

Even when it’s up against the NFL, even when the odds seem insurmountable, eventually, the house always wins.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.