The Josh Innes Show - John Mateer Betting On Sports?

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

Oklahoma QB John Mateer is denying claims that he has bet on sports. Now, it's easy for people to assume that he has bet on sports considering the fact his Venmo transactions are labeled "Sports Gambling". Did he do it? Is he truly that stupid? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, everybody. I really enjoy this John Mateer's story. John Mateer being the quarterback at Oklahoma, the most highly sought-after player in the transfer portal lands at Oklahoma. Oklahoma needs to be good because Oklahoma cannot continue to suck. That's not how things go at Oklahoma. They move to the SEC and suck. So they go out and they get John Mateer. He's supposed to be a rock star.

and now he's facing allegations of sports betting after his VINMO transactions pop up. I don't know why these transactions popped up now. I have no idea why VINMO transactions from three years ago are a thing, but they are. And it appears he has multiple instances in his VINMO of sports gambling. So basically here's a transaction, sends money to his buddy, who they believe to be a teammate from when he was at Washington. state, and transaction happens, and it's listed as sports gambling. There's two of them.

Sports gambling, sports gambling, with one instance having a specific game in the sports gambling. It was a USC, a UCLA-U-A game. So everybody's up in arms over this big discussion, people talking about it. Cool. Here's the thing. First off, let's do this. Let's just get the commercials out of the way, and let's dive into this.

this whole thing with John Mateer. All right. So, John Mateer, here's what I want to believe. I want to believe that nobody could be so stupid as to commit the ultimate sin as it relates to being an athlete. There is no greater sin than anyone could commit than betting on the game. Throwing the game, I guess, would be the ultimate sin. That's more fair.

Betting on the game, I mean, hey, you could bet on your sin. you could put down $1,000 on you to have X number of passing yards. Basically, to me, as long as you're not going out there and throwing a game, I'm not that concerned about whether or not you bet on the game. Like, if you went out and truly bet on yourself, like, okay, you bet on yourself. You bet on yourself to throw for X number of yards. But if you bet on yourself to have fewer catches or fewer passing yards, which is an easier way to make money, that I think screws with the integrity of the game.

Although, if you're trying to hit a passing yardage over, you may go out. there in a game that's a blowout and keep throwing, even though you shouldn't be throwing in a situation, or if the coach calls for a run, you throw it. Again, I'm going way too down the rabbit hole here. I'm in the weeds on this. I understand that. Everyone knows you don't bet on sports. That's obvious. That's going to get you popped. That's not a good thing. I have no idea how these things became public. I have no idea why they're public. but the story went viral a couple of nights ago. He made two payments with sports gambling in the memo, and it's all over social media.

Oklahoma's talked about it. John Mateer has now denied this and said, I've never been on sports, basically saying I'm not that stupid. Oklahoma officials have been proactive in the whole thing, and they're just making sure that this isn't a huge deal. I mean, they went out, they got this guy in the portal, they're paying the sky. They want to make sure they're not going to be screwed because this guy ends up. suspended, whatever. Here's what I believe. I don't think anyone, including 19, 20, 21-year-old, 18-year-old person, is dumb enough

because everything's out there in the world now. You know all the things you can and cannot do, particularly if you're an athlete. You know what you can't do. You know that you can't bet on sports. I am going to actually give this guy, at least on one hand. I'm going to look at both sides of it here. On one hand, I find it hard to believe that in the Venmo, in your Venmo memo, which very few people even use the Venmo memo, like the only time I ever used the memo for Venmo is when, like, I was paying when I'd go get haircuts in St. Louis, the person who cut my hair would take Venmo. And it was a friend of mine.

So I just put like, got my her did, right? Like that kind of shit. And a lot of times, if people use Venmo for their business, if that's how they get paid, if people get paid, you know, if they're a hairstylist, whatever, someone who you pay for services or goods via Venmo, a lot of times they don't want you to leave a paper trail of what you paid for for tax reasons. You can kind of skirt around things if you just end up with a random $50 or something or $200 in your Venmo account as opposed to something that says,

hey, you know, because you can maybe get audited. So, you know, you don't want to put, hey, you know, got my haircut or, you know, whatever. Some of them like you to just leave the VIMO memo section just empty. But whatever. On one hand, I give this guy the benefit of the doubt because I don't believe that somebody can be so stupid as to commit, not a crime necessarily, but commit an infraction. that could lead to you being permanently barred from playing a sport that presumably is going to make you a lot of money, I find it hard to believe that this person would go out and put the crime he's committing in the memo section of the story or of the transaction.

I find that hard to believe. I find it hard to believe that someone would go out and like, hey, I'm buying shit to murder someone. I'm going to put that in the Venmo memo. Someone's like, hey, I'm heading off to Lowe's where I'm going to buy like concrete and one of those empty buckets and some zip ties and a hacksaw. And in the memo section, it says, for to commit murder and bury the body. Like, I don't think someone's that dumb. Now, granted, this would have been a young kid. This would have been three years ago. This would have been a guy, you know, late teens, early 20s. So, Maybe he's that dumb, but I just find it hard to believe that somebody could be so stupid, so dumb.

Like, let's say that you're sports betting with your buddy. Like, say both, let's assume that these two guys who are presumably teammates are betting on games, right? Your buddy's even got to be like, hey, bro, maybe next time don't, like, put that shit in there because, you know, we're betting on shit that we're not supposed to bet on. Could you maybe do that, Johnny? Who's to say that maybe he didn't finally figure out that that wasn't a good idea and they made more transaction? I don't know. I mean, I assume they would have listed more transactions between those two guys. Now, the story that is being told by John Mateer is that John Matier says, well, it's an inside joke with me and my buddies.

Now, that's a strange and oddly specific inside joke. I have a lot of inside jokes with my buddies. If you looked, now, and again, in his defense, if you look at your text messages with your buddies, if you look at the group chat, if you just look at it out of context and not what you guys are actually talking about, there's a bunch of fucked up shit in your messages, in your DMs, and you guys say some fucked up repugnant shit. And if you just look at it through the lens of like, what the fuck, you'd go, holy shit, that's vile. I would imagine that there are people that it reminds me of a Dane Cook joke from many years ago. I think it was in the vicious circle thing about his stand-up. And one of the bits was about people using the word rape, right? And about how, like, we use the word rape, not as to say like somebody legitimately got raped,

but holy cow, like the saints got raped yesterday. Doesn't make it a classy way to do it. It's a very crass way to do it. But a lot of people will say that. Like, oh, we went out, like, we're going to go to Vegas, and we're going to rape Vegas. We're going to rape the books, right? Oh, that was a prison rape. Like, people say that all the time.

And the setup for the bit was that. And then it becomes like, it's like, imagine when you're playing games with someone. And, like, you talk, you know, people say like, oh, you got raped. Reverse it and talk to someone who actually got raped. Do you think that person goes, like, what's it like to be raped? And she says, have you ever played Halo? like that's not the way it works right like it's a very crass way to do it but if you look at the DMs and you look at the group chats and you look at the texts when you're talking with your buddies

you say some fucked up shit and that fucked up shit taken out of context like let's say that somehow you get involved in a court case and your text messages come down the pike and have to be used as evidence and people start looking at the shit they'd go holy shit this person is a monster And you're like, no, I'm not a monster. This is just the weird fucked up way that me and my buddies talk. So a lot of buddies have weird inside jokes. That's not wrong. It's strange to me that your inside joke is sports betting, parentheses, USC, UCLA.

That is a strange, very odd thing to put for an inside joke. Oh, we're just goofing. It's me and my buddies. It's our inside joke, our inside joke about sports gambling. You know, like when we send each other money on Venmo and we put sports gambling, parentheses, USC, UCLA. I would buy it more if the parentheses USC UCLA wasn't there. If you just told like I would, I would just completely dismiss this story if that were the situation.

If the situation were just sports betting, I could see like where ha-ha, I put sports betting. He went, why you would do that, I don't know, what kind of weird. Like, I just don't know what your inside jokes are. I have no idea why that's your inside joke. Fine, that's what you guys do. That's your cute little rapport, whatever. It's the parentheses USC, UCLA that makes me go, huh. But again, I choose to believe that somebody couldn't be so stupid.

I choose to believe that somebody is not so dumb as to say, hey, by the way, I'm committing an infraction. Somehow somebody saw this, I guess they did, because if somebody unearthed these, I would guess that the transaction memos are public. I don't know. I don't know why you would leave them public, but it's public. So I don't know. But I choose to believe, and maybe I'm giving this dude way too much credit here. I just choose to believe that somebody is not so stupid, so dumb to commit a crime, basically. And I say commit a crime, you know, parentheses crime.

Crime in the world of sports, which is betting on sports, which will get you banned, suspended, maybe kicked out for life. Like this dude that's like the third or fourth string quarterback for the Saints who's in their training camp was a dude that got kicked out of like Iowa State or something like that for sports betting and I had to go to D, like Division 2. So I choose to believe and I want to believe that somebody would not be so stupid. but people do stupid shit and we know like people do stupid shit I just I'm leaning towards and maybe I am naive here

but I am leaning towards somebody not being that dumb and as I said if it weren't for the parentheses USC UCLA or whatever it was if it wasn't for the parentheses specific game I dismiss it and just go okay

maybe they have an inside joke is that the only evidence do you have does he does you know, does he have a Fanduel account? Does he have a Draft King's account? Are they just exchanging money between the two of them taking bets? That's very possible as well. Like to me, it's a bigger situation if somebody is betting on their own games and throwing games versus, you know, two dudes who were playing at Washington State, dude goes, you know what, I think that UCLA is winning today or UCLA is covering today. And an old boy goes, okay, well, you'll see. I'm going to take I'm going to take UCLA or USC straight up, whatever.

That doesn't bother me that much. I mean, I know that you're not supposed to bet on sports, but I think it's a lot different when, you know, they let dudes play fantasy sports, right? A lot of dudes promote fantasy sports. Fantasy sports is prop bets. It's gambling. So you mean to tell me you have a major issue with a guy, you know,

taking his own prop bets, but if he had a fantasy team, you don't have a problem with that? How many times do you hear players say, hey, I got this guy on my fantasy team? That is betting. the fact that they still don't connect betting and fantasy is outrageous to me it is prop bets that is all it is so a lot of those things I don't find appalling right I find it appalling when you're dumb enough to do it and get caught because you know that it's the worst thing you can do I just don't believe that some guy is that stupid

I find it hard to believe you could be so dumb as to do that and leave a trail and again even if they bet between each other. It's still weird to me that you would put that. Just send the fucking money to your buddy. What are we doing here? Anywho, more to come.