Several times a month, Mark Potter arrives on college campuses armed with slides, videos and his own story, that of a former professional rugby player whose athletic career was derailed by gambling. And, of course, he brings along the NCAA rules that bar athletes from betting.
“It’s an issue that you can almost ignore until it hits you in the face,” Potter said this week. “You can assume that it’s not an issue on your campus because maybe you don’t see it like alcohol or drugs. And I think when things come out in the news, it makes you say, ‘Oh, I think we better do something to mitigate against this because we don’t want that to be our college.’ ”
This series will examine the impact of legalized gambling on sports, through news coverage, accountability journalism and advice for navigating this new landscape.
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Irregular betting around an Alabama-LSU baseball game set off alarms last month, eventually leading to the firing of Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon, who was accused of tipping off a gambler that the Tide’s star pitcher would miss a start. In Iowa, the state’s Division of Criminal Investigation is looking into wagers placed by more than three dozen athletes across football, basketball and other sports at Iowa and Iowa State.
The NCAA won’t comment on active investigations, but a spokesperson says the organization is “monitoring the situation.” The Alabama case appears to be isolated to one coach. In Iowa, Brian Ohorilko, the administrator of the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission, told the Des Moines Register none of the athletes’ gambling activities seemed suspicious. But the headlines have cast renewed scrutiny on the vulnerability of college sports and athletes in this age of legal sports betting.
While the scope and details from the three gambling-related events are still largely unknown, this is in many ways the very controversy the NCAA and college administrators feared lurked quietly on its doorstep these past five years. It’s why pearls were clutched and bylaws were passed. The trio of events might not mark a day of reckoning, but it may prompt immediate reflection on the relationship between sports gambling and college athletes and their athletic departments.
“One of the things that often comes with the legalization of gambling is scandal,” said Brett Abarbanel, a UNLV professor and the executive director of the school’s International Gaming Institute, “and then there’s pushback and then learning from that scandal and then trying to refine what we’ve done.”
New laws, old habits
The rules are clear and stricter than they are for pro athletes: Under NCAA bylaws, athletes (and athletic department staff) can’t bet on any sport, college or professional, in which the NCAA stages a championship game. For instance: a Division I golfer or soccer player can’t bet on an NBA game because the NCAA hosts basketball tournaments to crown its national champions. But a college athlete could wager on horse racing or play slots at the local casino without fear of punishment.
The NCAA knows college athletes have long flouted these rules. In 2016, the organization surveyed its athletes anonymously and found that one in four male competitors admitted to wagering on a sporting event, a transgression largely done in secret because of a federal law that outlawed sports betting everywhere but Nevada.
Not many felt that number would magically shrink when the Supreme Court struck down that law in 2018 and states across the country began legalizing sports betting. (It’s now legal in 33 states, plus D.C.) Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, said college-aged students are more prone to risk-taking behaviors and are especially susceptible to problem gambling.
“I think what we’ve seen is the risk has increased recently with the expansion of legalized sports betting,” he said, “but that’s piling on top of existing risk and lack of compliance.”
Given that history — and that it was regulators who flagged the incidents in Iowa and Alabama — it’s unclear whether they signal a growing problem or a long-standing one under a stronger microscope. Jason Robins, chief executive of DraftKings, the nation’s largest online sportsbook, argues it’s the latter.
“Things are getting caught and escalated appropriately quickly,” he said in an interview. “That’s a sign that the system is working, to me.” Before legal betting, he argued, scandals “would come out months or even years after the event occurred. In the legal market, you’ve seen pretty immediate identification of issues. I think that’s the best deterrent.”
The NCAA’s rules also may lead to more bets getting flagged, for better or worse. Even as states have relaxed laws governing sports betting in the five years since the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, the NCAA’s rule book is unchanged.
“As the sports wagering landscape continues to rapidly evolve, the national office is actively gathering data, analyzing trends and preparing information for the membership to consider,” the NCAA spokesperson said. “Any rule changes would be a membership decision.”
A busy watchdog
Monitoring sports betting is a complicated process involving virtually every stakeholder. Most states that have legalized it included provisions calling for independent monitoring. U.S. Integrity, a Nevada-based firm, works with virtually every major professional sports league and college conference, as well as most regulated sports books and state gaming commissions.
The company monitors betting habits and changing odds across the country, identifying hundreds of abnormalities, from sports around the world, every month that prompt investigators to dig deeper. In the Alabama case, a staffer at the BetMGM Sportsbook in Cincinnati noticed suspicious betting and reported it to U.S. Integrity, which in turn notified the Ohio Casino Control Commission.
“It was compelling enough, let me just say, that we determined to ban all bets on Alabama baseball,” Matthew Schuler, the commission’s executive director, said in an interview. A bettor caught on surveillance video was in communication with Bohannon as he placed his bets, according to an ESPN report. Within days, Alabama fired Bohannon, saying he violated “the standards, duties, and responsibilities expected of University employees.” Bohannon did not return a message this week and has not commented on the incident.
Most bets that raise suspicions prove to be innocuous, though. Matt Holt, chief executive of U.S. Integrity, offered the example of one college football official who consistently referees games that fail to reach the total score used by oddsmakers to entice over/under bets, resulting in under wagers paying out 80 percent of the time. The firm has twice investigated and determined that the official simply gives out a high percentage of procedural penalties, which slows down high-octane offenses and limits scoring.
“So we didn’t believe that it was anything to do with any type of match-fixing or game manipulation,” he said.
Of the hundreds of abnormalities each month, Holt said, only 15 to 18 prompt an alert to regulators and sports books. Of those, only about half result in some form of punishment. He said alerts occur about once every 1,100 events, a rate that hasn’t changed since the federal law was struck down five years ago.
“I know it seems like right now there’s this big black cloud of potential violations out there,” he said. “But I think as we continue to … have betting transparency and data sharing and collaboration and an integrity mandate, we’re going to see those numbers start to stabilize.”
Of the 33 states that have legalized sports betting, Oregon is the only one that prohibits any form of gambling on college sports. Nine others bar gamblers from betting on in-state colleges. But in most, all college sports are available to sportsbooks. In determining where to draw the lines, each state had to consider how those rules would impact the schools and the athletes.
“They’re young kids out there playing and have a whole national audience of people that are placing wagers on their behavior. And it’s a lot of pressure on someone who’s not decided to make it their professional career,” said Schuler, the head of Ohio’s gaming commission. “And along with that comes individuals who say mean things, say nasty things or, maybe in the extreme cases, threatening things to these young folks who are out there to play a game.”
Even as the NCAA’s strict bylaws remain unchanged, some schools are sending out mixed messages on sports betting. A handful have gone into business with gambling operators, signing lucrative deals to promote their brands. While the University of Colorado recently ended its controversial agreement with PointsBet early, schools including Maryland, LSU and Michigan State have announced partnerships with “official sports betting partners” such as the Caesars Sportsbook.
“I don’t think college athletics as we know it survives this massive influx of sports betting,” said Whyte, head of the problem gambling council. “There’s no other country in the world that has so much of their gambling market on unpaid amateur athletes. The system as it is, sports betting as it is — and where they’re both growing and going — there’s far too much money in gambling on amateurs for it to be sustainable for amateur athletics.”
Most states have set 21 as the minimum legal betting age, but studies show that college students have some familiarity with gambling well before then. The NCAA’s 2016 survey found that 90 percent of male college athletes and 82 percent of female athletes placed their first bet before coming to college. Nine percent of the male athletes said they bet on sports more than once a month, and 1 in 50 meet criteria to be considered problem gamblers. Fifty-four percent of male athletes and 31 percent of female athletes said they considered sports gambling a harmless activity.
The NCAA set out to conduct an updated study in 2020, but collection was halted because of the coronavirus pandemic. The organization’s spokesperson said new NCAA president Charlie Baker has directed the organization to do more research.
‘No silver bullet’
College athletes have long been viewed as the most vulnerable group when it comes to problem gambling and potential game-fixing. They make far less money than their professional counterparts and yet are surrounded by coaches and administrators who often draw healthy salaries. Team and game information, especially injury news that might impact betting lines, is often closely guarded.
Some industry watchers fear the rise of in-game betting could ramp up temptations, allowing an athlete, coach or official to influence a single minor play at the behest of a gambler without significantly affecting the game’s outcome.
That’s among the warnings that Potter presents when he visits campuses to discuss sports betting. The NCAA has leeway on punishing athletes caught gambling, he tells them, determined on a case-by-case basis. Last year, it issued a nine-game suspension, later reduced to six on appeal, to Virginia Tech football player Alan Tisdale for betting on NBA games.
Potter relays his own story, too, of how he felt a void when he was injured and went looking for ways to satisfy his athletic instincts. He outlines the triggers and tells the athletes why they’re especially vulnerable: competitive urges, a transition to a new school, downtime while injured, the desire to succeed, an abundance of sports knowledge.
“I don’t think you will ever be able to 100 percent mitigate all aspects of risk, because this happens across the world in every sport,” he said in an interview. “But with educational programs and helping them make better-informed choices and understanding what the risks are, then you’d think that minimizes the chances of individuals going down the route of either problematic play or integrity issues. But there’s no silver bullet that will cure everything.”
Ben Strauss contributed to this report.