When the 136 NCAA Tournament teams were revealed Sunday night, the bracket and betting bonanza began.
Americans are expected to legally wager more than $3.3 billion on the Division I men’s and women’s basketball tournaments over the next three weeks, according to the American Gaming Association.
But exactly two months before Selection Sunday, the NCAA was dealing with a different kind of betting madness, as details emerged in one of the most widespread game-fixing cases in the history of college basketball. Federal prosecutors charged 26 people — including three former DePaul players — in a point-shaving scheme that allegedly involved 39 players on 17 Division I teams manipulating 29 games.
Game integrity issues always have been a concern in sports, including college basketball.
In the 1950s, another large scheme involved more than 30 players from seven colleges, including Bradley, over 86 games. The 1990s were rife with point-shaving scandals, including one involving Northwestern players Kenneth Dion Lee and Dewey Williams and former Notre Dame football kicker Kevin Pendergast. And there have been issues in multiple NCAA sports, including a major scandal in Iowa, since sports gambling became legal on a state-by-state basis in 2018.
But Mark Hicks, the NCAA’s managing director of enforcement, acknowledged that the current issues — which include a separate game manipulation and insider information scandal on the West Coast — have been “pretty significant.”
As betting continues to boom, what can the NCAA, its conferences and its institutions do to help ensure their student-athletes are staying out of it? The game integrity preservation business has a lot of facets. Here’s a look at four.
Integrity monitoring
Last week, the NCAA announced plans to implement Integrity Compliance 360’s ProhiBet system to monitor game officials in its men’s and women’s basketball, baseball and softball tournaments for betting. IC360 bills ProhiBet as the industry’s only system tracking prohibited bettors.
That’s just one piece of what the NCAA calls the largest global integrity monitoring program, screening more than 22,000 NCAA contests in a year for integrity concerns. Sportradar also provides monitoring services to the NCAA, including for the College Football Playoff this year, and Hicks said the organization has lines of communication open with multiple monitors.
Conferences also enlist their own integrity monitoring services, including a Big Ten partnership with IC360. Such groups analyze changes in betting data and weigh them against player and coach events, officiating irregularities and the potential for insider information.
The private monitors are in addition to sports wagering operators reporting suspicious line movements or betting activity to state gaming commissions. It’s a network of various entities interested in protecting game integrity.
“That system has allowed us to identify things and address them much quicker than pre-2018,” Hicks said. “So I don’t know if the behavior is worse, or is this just being detected?”
Hicks said the NCAA tries to impress upon athletic departments that there’s a third, less formal integrity monitor: individuals on campus who can talk and listen to athletes about potential issues.
“It may not just be the coach but the academic advisers, the athletic trainers, people that are going to spend a lot of time with young folks, just listening to them,” Hicks said. “And are they talking about betting? Are they talking about somebody asking for inside information?
“We all have to be vigilant collectively at the campus level, and we have to speak to student-athletes about the dangers. Get to a situation where individuals feel more comfortable with coming forward if they’ve been approached, as opposed to just keeping that inside.”
That starts with a multi-tiered education component.
Education
Since partnering with the NCAA in 2022, EPIC Global Solutions teams have traveled across the country speaking at more than 300 institutions about gambling harm. Their lineup of speakers includes several former high-level athletes and recovering problem gamblers, headlined by Stevin “Hedake” Smith, the former Arizona State basketball star who went to prison for his role in a 1990s point-shaving scandal.
The goal is to educate athletes, coaches and administrators about the current issues surrounding gambling and also to raise awareness among athletes about why they can be at risk for harm, given their competitive nature, a need to relieve stress and often a belief that they would have an advantage due to their expertise in a sport.
“The reality is that the things that make them elite competitors can make them very poor gamblers,” EPIC U.S. sport program manager Brian Selman said. “And so we’ll walk through that with them a little bit and tell our story, and then just try and be conduits for awareness and a sense of care and just raising their antennas associated with what’s going on in the space and how it’s affecting their peers, whether it’s something that they identify with or not.”
The program is part of the NCAA’s education component, which includes an e-learning module that athletes complete.
One of the hallmarks of the January fixing case was that the players targeted were from mid-major and lower-level programs, many of them in the midst of losing seasons or heavy underdogs in their games. Some came from schools that might not have the same level of name, image and likeness (NIL) investment as larger programs, making players more vulnerable to financial considerations.
Selman said such athletes might not be taking into consideration how robust the monitoring services are now, even for lower-level games, and the wide-reaching effects of what might seem like a harmless decision. That’s part of the awareness they’re trying to raise.
“When gambling goes poorly, how many other people are affected?” Selman said. “This notion that if I shave something for a particular prop bet — rebounds or whatever it may be — that there’s a victimless crime, and it’s just not the case.
“There’s so many people, whether it be friends or family or otherwise, that are supporting these student-athletes, that these decisions that are made in short-term focus end up having bigger repercussions than they’re considering at the time.”
Of course, Hicks said, once the education is in place, the decision is still up to the athlete. He said in the NCAA’s recent investigations, it didn’t encounter any athletes who said they didn’t know what they were doing was wrong or against the rules.
“Sometimes people still make choices, as sad as they may be, so we just keep trying to educate as much as we can,” Hicks said. “So I like to use the term awareness too. I’m not sure we’re teaching people, other than just bringing awareness to (the fact that) if someone’s contacting you and asking you for inside information or if you want to make money on a game, that’s a problem. That’s not something you should just say no and move on.
“You need to let somebody know because they’re not going to stop at you if you say no. They’re just going to go to the next person.”
Regulatory pleas
Many states have regulations when it comes to gambling on college games. In Illinois, bettors can’t wager on in-state college teams, including proposition bets — wagers on a specific event or performance metric.
But not all states have such regulations, and NCAA President Charlie Baker has been vocal about wanting all prop bets on college athletes banned in all states. He sent a letter recently to state gambling commissions asking for such bans, along with certain in-game props, such as first-half over/under spreads, a target revealed in the federal case.
Last month, the Big Ten Student-Athlete Issues Commission sent a letter to Baker urging him to continue that push. The letter cited harassment, athlete mental health and integrity as concerns that surround prop bets.
“While we understand that sports betting is becoming increasingly more common across the country and allows for states to generate increased tax revenue, prop betting presents unique risks at the college level,” the letter said. “These bets focus on individual and team actions and performances, leaving student-athletes directly at the center of gambling outcomes and exposed to potential backlash.
“When bets are tied to individual statistics or plays, it creates pressure and suspicion around student-athletes’ performance. Even when no wrongdoing occurs, prop betting can raise doubts about effort, decision-making and fairness. This damages trust in competition and puts student-athletes in a vulnerable position.”
The newest highly debated regulatory matter in all sports involves prediction markets, in which people trade event contracts against each other about the outcome of those events. The markets are regulated by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission instead of the states, and that has led to lawsuits from states that believe it amounts to gambling.
In January, Baker asked the CFTC to suspend college sports offerings among prediction markets, such as Kalshi, until proper regulations are in place. For college institutions, Hicks noted that the trading age of 18 on prediction markets could be an issue, as well as the lack of regulation on reporting to gaming boards when a game appears to be compromised.
The NCAA also has pushed for states to include language about repercussions for those who engage in student-athlete harassment.
Student-athlete protection
The NCAA and its partner Signify Group conducted a study during the NCAA Tournament last year of more than 1 million social media posts and comments directed at players, coaches, teams and officials. AI flagged more than 54,000 as potentially harmful, and analysts confirmed 3,161 abusive or threatening messages. Signify referred 10 of them to law enforcement.
Baker has made such harassment one of the focal points of the conversation around college sports gambling.
Jake Marsh, head of sport at Signify, said at an NCAA Convention sports gambling session that student-athletes often face two kinds of abuse. The public kind is often attention-seeking and involves venting or wanting other users to pile on. Private messages often are sent to try to affect an athlete’s performance. Both behaviors can be driven or exacerbated by sports gambling.
He spoke of the importance of having a system of reporting available to players and coaches should they encounter such harassment.
Selman said at most EPIC sessions they hear from someone who says, “You wouldn’t believe what happened here.”
“We try to anonymize them and share those examples as much as possible,” Selman said. “So that not just the student-athletes but the coaches and the administrators understand: This is relevant for you today — not just because our people slipped up a decade ago or whatever it may be.”
The conversations about what’s best for student-athletes are constantly evolving.
At the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments this year, teams must fill out mandatory availability reports, an effort to reduce gamblers’ efforts to obtain insider information or harass athletes about such matters.
The NCAA Division I administrative committee widened some eyes in the fall when it adopted a proposal to allow student-athletes and staff to bet on pro sports. The current policy restricts them from betting on any sport — at any level — in which the NCAA hosts a championship, even while their peers are doing so regularly.
“It’s a pretty restrictive rule in an age globally, beyond sports betting, where we tend to be in a less regulated society,” Hicks said.
Much debate ensued about whether such a rule change would blur lines too much as the NCAA tries to preserve its sports’ integrity. Selman offered the counterpoint.
“You’d have to be an incredible optimist to think this will go great and there won’t be any tradeoffs associated with this,” Selman said. “You’re asking a population of people whose brains have not fully developed yet to make perfect — not just good but perfect — choices and decisions associated with a topic that could forfeit their reputation, their scholarship and their career in sport. That’s dangerous, no matter what you do.”
In a very close vote, two-thirds of Division I schools voted to rescind the rule change. Betting on any NCAA championship sport at any level remains outlawed for student-athletes.
Meanwhile, much of the rest of the country is betting on them.
