There’s a gambling hurricane coming for college basketball
If you thought the recent NBA bet-rigging details were bad, brace yourself for what’s about to happen in college basketball.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, we’re forecasting stormy weather.
Hardly a week goes by now without a sports betting scandal of some sort. The ink was barely dry on those NBA bet-rigging indictments when a new controversy swirled about a UFC fighter possibly throwing a bout in Las Vegas last Saturday.
Both stories share a similarity—the FBI. Federal agents arrested the 34 people charged in the gambling-and-poker probe that ensnared NBA players and coaches, and the FBI was in touch with UFC executives before heavily-favored featherweight Isaac Dulgarian was choked out in the first round.
The Feds, it appears, have a renewed interest in bet-rigging across U.S. sports. And if that’s true, both of those stories likely pale in comparison to what’s coming soon in college basketball.
The breadcrumbs are all over. In September the NCAA announced it was investigating 13 players from six schools—Arizona State 🔱, Temple 🦉, Eastern Michigan 🦅, New Orleans 🏴☠️, North Carolina A&T 🐶 and Mississippi Valley State 👹—for potential gambling violations.1 A few weeks ago, in a statement responding to the NBA’s bet-rigging latest, the governing body said its enforcement staff had opened investigations into “approximately 30” current or former men’s basketball players.
“The Association has and will continue to pursue sports betting violations using a layered integrity monitoring program for over 22,000 contests,” NCAA president Charlie Baker said, “but we still need more states, regulators and gaming companies to help in this effort by eliminating risky prop bets to reduce opportunities for manipulation.”
Here’s Baker speaking with CNBC last month about the “horrific” messages sent to athletes due to those prop bets 👇
Feds are also on the case. Some of the same people caught in the FBI’s NBA probe are also linked to suspicious college betting. And according to ESPN, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania is investigating allegations of point shaving in college basketball. Point shaving. That’s the nightmare scenario for Baker and others in college sports, even if it comes out at a smaller DI school like New Orleans.
The NCAA, which would obviously be well aware of any federal probe, has also been ringing other alarm bells for more than a year. The Indianapolis-based organization has pushed state lawmakers—occasionally successfully—to ban prop bets in college sports, and has been increasingly outspoken about the toll that the industry has on athletes via online abuse and mental health challenges.
In a 2023 survey of athletes, the NCAA found that 25% of “Power 5” conference athletes and 10% of DI athletes were aware of harassment from people with gambling interests.
Perhaps most notably, when the NCAA decided earlier this year that it would start selling an official data feed for sportsbooks, it said it would require any operator that bought the data to also agree to limit “risky bet types.” At the time, an NCAA representative told Sportico that those included “high-risk proposition bets, specifically underperformance wagers, negative outcome bets and wagers on injuries, officials’ decisions or fan-voted awards.”
It’s easy to see why college basketball might be particularly susceptible to sports betting fraud. Especially at the sport’s mid and lower tiers, athletes receive little compensation with few prospects for a lucrative pro career. There are far more teams than in college football, and much smaller rosters, so individual players have a much bigger impact on the potential outcome of games. College students are also generally less mature than their pro counterparts, and may be more susceptible to manipulation by criminals. I wrote two weeks ago about the lag between what integrity monitors can detect and what athletes think they can detect—and smaller colleges have far fewer resources to dedicate towards athlete education and compliance.
Every year, gambling data giant Sportradar releases an annual report of suspicious betting activity detected around the world. Its data consistently finds that when broken out by sport, basketball has the second highest frequency of suspicious matches (0.32%). It ranks behind soccer (0.43%) but way ahead of esports (0.08%) in third. Tennis, viewed by many as the poster child for corruption at the lower levels, is fourth at 0.06%.
Sportradar is the official monitoring partner of the NCAA but does not break out any data by college or pro. It does show what types of basketball markets are most likely to be flagged for irregularities.
College basketball, of course, has been down a similar road with the FBI in the past decade. Back in Sept. 2017, federal investigators called a press conference in Manhattan to announce a series of arrests involving bribery in college basketball recruiting. The probe involved coaches, agents and an Adidas rep, and during the announcement, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York promised to expose the “dark belly of college basketball.”
Over the years, however, that proclamation lost its sting.2 Most people in college sports now view that investigation, and the charges that came from it, as an unfair witch hunt, a quest by federal agents to use the popularity of the sport to make an example of a few unknown middlemen. If the sport had a “dark belly,” the FBI definitely didn’t target any of the most prominent people profiting off it.
We’ll see if the betting charges, when they come, feel similar. Maybe they’ll feel equally hollow. Or maybe they’ll shock fans in their depth and range.
Or maybe college basketball will avoid scandal entirely. Don’t bet on that.
Jacob’s 🔥 Take: Doesn’t it seem like people are talking out of both sides of their mouths on this issue? On one hand, legalizing sports betting has brought “more integrity” by making it easier to monitor suspicious activity and monitor bad actors. And yet, on the other hand, there’s a movement to ban prop bets—likely driving them back to black markets—in the name of fair play?
On the most recent Sporticast episode, Scott and Eben spoke about a more positive college sports story! Fairleigh Dickinson University, a small private school in New Jersey, is adding a men’s fencing that it expects will be profitable basically immediately. How? I break it down here 👇
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
We do know who some of those players are. ESPN connected the dots in this story.
Our colleague Daniel Libit recently wrote a great profile of Christian Dawkins, one of the only people to go to jail following those charges.