In case you missed it, Jeff Pearlman isn’t here for sports media propped up by gambling dollars.
So much so that the New York Times best-selling author weighed in on the short-lived Pablo Torre-Bill Simmons feud, by claiming The Ringer is being kept alive by “blood money.” Pearlman might not be trying to start another sports media beef, but he has a bone to pick with gamblers. And he has a bone to pick with Simmons, too.
The issue was raised again by him in another TikTok post, as he lamented the recent treatment of Olympic champion sprinter Gabby Thomas. A sports bettor in Philadelphia loudly patted himself on the back after heckling Thomas, taking credit for her fourth-place finish at a Grand Slam Track event in Philadelphia, which helped him win his parlay.
FanDuel banned the guy, but Pearlman’s point goes way deeper.
“Someone is going to get f*cking killed,” Pearlman said. “Some athlete is going to get killed because of gambling. I don’t even think that’s a guess; I feel like it’s almost guaranteed. Some angry gambler is going to lose a sh*t load of money, and he or she, but almost certainly he, is going to show up at someone’s house or some sporting event, and he’s going to shoot an athlete. I feel like we’re this close to that happening if you’ve looked at the number of threats.”
Pearlman wants to make clear that he’s not trying to make an enemy out of Simmons, whom he respects deeply. He’s been on Simmons’ podcast before and acknowledged, “I think Bill Simmons has done a lot of wonderful things for media.”
That said, he didn’t hold back when calling out The Ringer’s cozy relationship with FanDuel.
“But, The Ringer’s alliance with FanDuel is really, really troubling — like, really troubling,” Pearlman continued. “I feel like if you listen to Bill Simmons these days, you basically can’t enjoy sports without gambling. If you go to The Ringer or listen to a Ringer podcast, you cannot separate sports and gambling. They’re like this. ‘And if you watch sports, you should gamble. Sports are fun. Gambling and sports, even more fun. And if you don’t gamble, you should gamble. And if you really don’t gamble, you should gamble. And if someone’s not telling you to gamble, you should gamble.'”
Pearlman also called out something The Ringer did last week that he described as “really f*cked up.”
He’s talking about the since-deleted social post from The Ringer’s official X account, where the Spotify-owned media company urged followers to reject an Illinois state proposal to tax every bet placed in the state.
“That is so f*cked up,” Pearlman said. “So, you basically have The Ringer, now, taking the political position of pro-gambling. And the idea that the Illinois legislature is trying to deter people to a certain degree by gambling is now anti-Ringer. And The Ringer ended up taking that tweet down after they got too much heat about it. But, like, this is a real problem.
“And I’m telling you, again, this sh*t, we’ve seen it with so many athletes now. Lance McCuller last week. Gabby Thomas. On and on and on. The number of athletes getting direct threats from gamblers is no longer a joke. It’s no longer a ‘Ha ha.’ And I read an interview with Bill Simmons where he really dismissed it, and I thought kind of callously and dickishly, where he talked about how this has always been a thing… He said, ‘It’s a different muscle when you’re following sports and gambling. I think we’re going to get there with the gambling thing. What’s gonna happen is a lot of people are gonna latch onto this. You know how the internet goes. This is something they could go nuts about.'”
To Pearlman, Simmons’ response in that interview — framing the backlash as just another internet cycle — missed the larger issue. In his view, this isn’t about one fan crossing a line but about a broader culture that enables and encourages that kind of behavior. When a respected media company blurs the line between sports coverage and gambling promotion, Pearlman argues, it’s not hard to see how fans might take things too far.
That’s ultimately why Simmons keeps coming up in the conversation, not necessarily as a villain, but as a symbol of how sports media has changed. For Pearlman, Simmons once represented a fan-first voice, someone who loved sports for the sake of the game. Now, he sees that same voice closely tied to an industry that tells fans the real fun begins when you place a bet.
“Bill Simmons, I always thought of as the ultimate sports fan,” Pearlman adds. “And we’ve reached a point now where if you’re not gambling on sports, you can’t enjoy it. If you’re not gambling on Celtics-Bucks, how can you enjoy Celtics-Bucks? If you’re not gambling for Shedeur Sanders to start for Cleveland in Week 1, how can you enjoy football? And I just — the number of kids you hear about now who gamble, who use the apps, find ways around it. The bullsh*t of the tiny writing at the bottom, the warning… It’s a f*cking issue.
“And, honestly, more than anything, I’d like Bill Simmons to sort of not just acknowledge that you’re taking this f*cking blood money, which is starting to feel like what it is, but to acknowledge that you don’t need to gamble to enjoy sports. In fact, you can probably enjoy sports, probably not gambling, without the pressure, without the spirit of despondency once you lose, without hating an athlete because he gave up a meatball home run. I’m just saying. We need to do something.”
For now, Simmons hasn’t responded. The Ringer took the tweet down. FanDuel banned the heckler. But none of that really answers what Pearlman keeps coming back to, not just the behavior but the culture that rewards it. If everything in sports is going to be tied to a bet, what’s left when the bet goes bad?