Calvin Ridley suspension: Has an NFL player ever been suspended for betting on games before?

There are five players in NFL history who have been suspended for gambling on NFL games, including a name recognized in the NFL Hall of Fame.

While Falcons wide receiver Calvin Ridley made a mistake in placing bets as an NFL player, the issue has arguably become more complicated over time.

The 2020 NFL CBA actually allows players and owners to profit from in-stadium bets, the league has partnered with seven gambling outfits, and the home of the New Orleans Saints has been renamed as Caesars Superdome.

While Ridley ideally should have been aware of the rules that prevent players from gambling, making casual online bets simply isn’t allowed. As a result, Ridley has been suspended for the entirety of the 2022 season.

However, Ridley isn’t the only professional football player to make this kind of mistake. Four other players have been penalized for gambling in NFL history, including two members of the NFL Hall of Fame.

Calvin Ridley joins four others on list of NFL players who have bet on games

If Alex Karras sounds familiar, it’s because he is the great uncle of New England Patriots center Ted Karras III, who is a third-generation NFL talent. Alex Karras’ two brothers, Ted and Lou, also played in the NFL. Before he played as a defensive tackle for the Detroit Lions during a 12-year NFL career, Alex Karras was a professional wrestler. After his NFL career, Karras had a successful career as an actor, starring as a father in the 1980s sitcom Webster.

When Karras was suspended in 1963, it was alongside Paul Hornung, who was a Hall of Fame running back who won four titles and the first Super Bowl with the Green Bay Packers. Hornung made football history as essentially the first player to be the best at every level: he was the first Heisman Trophy winner to be the No. 1 in the NFL Draft, win the NFL MVP Award, and be inducted into Hall of Fame at the professional and collegiate level. Vince Lombardi even called Hornung “the greatest player I ever coached.”

When Karras and Hornung were disciplined by the league in 1963, they were both banned from the NFL, but then-commissioner Pete Rozelle reinstated both of them in 1964. The two had differing reactions upon their suspension — Hornung was repentant, while Karras was outraged — for betting nearly the same amount as Ridley did 50 years later.

Unlike Hornung and Karras, Art Schlichter was never able to recover from his gambling behavior while in the NFL. Schlichter had a serious gambling addiction that cut his promising football career short. The former No. 4 overall pick was released from the Baltimore Colts by 1985, but he spiraled out over the subsequent decades, conning people out of millions of dollars to support his gambling habit. In 2011, Schlichter was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison on federal charges of wire fraud, bank fraud and filing a false tax return, which was worsened when he tested positive for cocaine while on probation.

Josh Shaw has the most similar case to Calvin Ridley, as he was only suspended three years prior. After being drafted by the Cincinnati Bengals in the 2015 NFL Draft, Shaw spent three years there until an IR stint prompted his release. Shaw was briefly signed to the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers until landing with the Arizona Cardinals in March 2019. In August 2019, he was placed on IR, and in November, Roger Goodell suspended Shaw for the 2020 NFL season for gambling. Shaw was reinstated in 2021, but the 29-year-old cornerback remains a free agent.

Unfortunately in Shaw’s case, the suspension seems to have ruined his opportunity to make the most of a second chance in the NFL. The same could happen with Ridley as he faces a year out of the league, and even though Ridley wasn’t with the Falcons when he placed the bet, neither was Shaw—and his NFL career was effectively finished by the suspension.