That's the beauty of gambling from a macro perspective though: you don't need scripted outcomes. The house wins either way. In fact scripted outcomes would be bad because not only is there heavy reputational stakes that could go south in a hurry, but that enables people to beat the house odds. If anything this seems like an incentive to keep things on the straight and narrow.

Necessary disclaimer since people will try to assume my position through my analysis: I don't like sports gambling, have never done it, and I hate that the ads have taken over.

There is a long, long, long history of gambling houses that are based on gambling on specific outcomes being unable to resist dipping into the revenue stream they can get from fixing the outcomes. Once the outcomes are fixed (even only probabilistically), they can tilt the house take in their favor.

It is true that, abstractly, this is a bad idea in the long run for many reasons. However, it's a good idea in the short term. It's a really good idea in the short term, at least from a superficial analysis. And we can expect that someone is going to do that superficial analysis. It only takes one in the entire industry.

A simple glance at history in this space says that the odds that someone is going to do this are for all practical purposes 1. The only question is whether it is already happening, and with high likelihood the correct question is how much it is already happening. It always starts small and they get bolder and bolder. None of this is subtle. None of this requires some sort of careful read of history carefully parsing out a tiny hint here and a whiff of a suggestion there. It's the completely obvious and repeatable strange attractor for gambling at this scale. As is the fact this will eventually blow up in some sort of scandal, after which it will end up heavily regulated again, until another generation or two goes by and forgets why gambling was fenced off.

Most of the cycle has happened once already within my personal lifetime. Major League Baseball had a pretty bad blowup in the late 1980s. Although as with some other vices, the fact that it is sitting there, in your pocket all the time, hooked up to Skinner-box mechanics in real time, is a new twist.

For bonus points society can also get to rediscover why simply banning it has never been all that successful either. Fencing it off seems to be the stable outcome that minimizes damage.

In the meantime the name of the game is to stay clear of the blast radius, and if you are a pro-social type, to try to figure out how to help the people who will get badly, badly hurt in the meantime until society puts the pieces together again.

In regular gambling, the house is in control. In sports gambling, the players and refs can have their own agenda.