Prediction markets create new leak temptations for NFL draft - ESPN

In 2016, the San Diego Chargers' front office and coaching staff were enthusiastic about Ohio State edge rusher Joey Bosa, but the rest of the league was unconvinced. Bosa had been out of the top-three conversation for months, and most of the prominent media mock drafts sent other players to San Diego at No. 3.

Tom Telesco, the former NFL general manager who led the Chargers front office from 2013 to '23, figures between 20 to 30 people would have known who the Chargers pick would likely be 24 hours before draft day, based on meetings with ownership, scouting meetings where prospects are discussed at length and the team's draft board is built, and internal whispering.

Back then, an insider with that knowledge would likely have needed to place the bet illegally, or with an offshore sports betting outfit. A decade later, someone armed with a similar sure-thing wager need only visit a prediction market website, sign up for an account and bet the farm, confident in their anonymity.

«This scares the s--- out of me,» Telesco said. «It's something I never would have considered a possibility.»

Nowadays, Telesco said, there's not much a GM can do but tighten the circle of people within an organization with insider knowledge and hope scandal doesn't hit.

«When I was a scout, we treated this information like state secrets,» Telesco said. «The only thing you can really do is scare people and tell them that heads will roll. At the end of the day, if you don't trust your employees, you've got the wrong employees.»

The NFL has flagged prediction markets as being particularly susceptible to insider abuse in the wake of multiple high-profile trades that accurately predicted the onset of U.S. military action in Iran and Venezuela, leading