When is enough enough?

Sports gambling is out of control and threatening sports more than anything else

Sportsbook inside the Westgate Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Credit: Jason Woodhead on Flickr.

Sports fans, gambling is back on the menu.

Well, the news menu, anyway.

Of course, I’m talking about the recent NCAA rule change to allow all athletes and administrators, regardless of their division, to bet on pro sports, starting November 1. This is a firm 180 from their previous rule of no betting on any sport sponsored by the NCAA in any way shape or form.

Wait, was there some other gambling-related news? Oh, huh.

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Before we get into this, we need to talk about my opinion and view on sports betting and gambling on athletics. Since this is a newsletter and - hopefully to some people - a sports media organization, the views of SID Sports and myself are one in the same.

I am not a sports bettor. I have never bet on the outcomes of games or props or anything like that. Like many people, I have put money on fantasy sport leagues, but that is the extent of my non-profitable career.

With that said, and as you may have known if you’ve been here a while, I am not a proponent for sports betting. Not to say that it should be banned, because it shouldn’t, but that it needs to be regulated further because it is a net negative of society.

As for SID Sports, there is no affiliation with any outside outfits or organizations. While I welcome the opportunity for partnerships, sponsorships and guest posts, this newsletter will not at any point include gambling information. You won’t see betting lines here or in any future iterations of SID Sports. You won’t see partnerships or sponsorships from betting sites. Nothing like that.

Glad we cleared that up. Let’s get into this.

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Our story blew up in the definitively not college football world of the NBA, where Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, Orlando Magic guard Terry Rozier and former player and coach Damon Jones were recently arrested in an FBI-led sting of illegal gambling operations. Billups for illegal mob-run poker games. Rozier for potentially illegal betting movements, just like Jontay Porter last year. Jones was implicated in both schemes.

It’s not the first time, and certainly not the last, that we’ve seen things like this break relating to the sports world. In fact, it’s not even the first one with criminal charges, as Porter plead guilty to wire fraud in his scandal earlier this year.

Right now, the NBA in particular is under fire. They’re dealing with an existential threat of multiple FBI-initiated gambling probes, multiple active players arrested in multiple different stings, and now a coach implicated with mob ties.

Not too long ago, we saw former official Tim Donaghy suffer the same fate, as in 2007, he was arrested and served time in prison for wire fraud, the same charge Porter is currently imprisoned for.

Wire fraud sounds like a classic white collar crime, and it is. In this case, and as FBI Director Kash Patel stated in his press conference last week, it’s equivalent to insider trading for sports betting. Players, and potentially coaches if you can see “Co-Conspirator 8” named in the indictment on Rozier about sports betting as Chauncey Billups, are fixing games. It’s not a big point-shaving scandal like we saw with the Black Sox or Boston College in the 1970s. Instead it’s prop bets and microbets that are getting moved.

Donaghy’s scandal was perhaps the extreme, with an official making calls to fix games. Regardless of how Donaghy claims he never once fixed a game, his calls dramatically impact the outcome and, by extension, the betting lines. If someone was to know that he didn’t like a player, was going to swallow his whistle, or favor one team, they have a leg up. Just like knowing LeBron James wasn’t going to play in a game would change the line considerably, which is information Jones is accused of providing outside people with to bet on Lakers games. Or knowing that Rozier is banged up and could pull himself from the game, making unders hit, which is what Scary Terry is charged with and what Porter plead guilty to.

It’s not just the NBA that this is extending to. Other sports are also under fire. This very newsletter covered the college football betting scandal at Iowa State in 2023 that led to multiple bans. The Cleveland Guardians have two players, Luis Ortiz and Emmanuel Clase, under investigation for prop-bet related performance. According to MLB, the two pitchers were flagged due to non-competitive first pitches in at bats where massive bets were placed on the first pitch being a ball.

College basketball is mired in its own scandal, with three Eastern Michigan men’s basketball players directly named by the NCAA as participating in “suspicious first-half betting activity” in at least three contests. No punishment will come to the players as they have no NCAA eligibility remaining.

Dayton University’s men’s basketball team is currently blocking Iona transfer Adam Njie due to pending betting investigations, though it’s unclear who is looking at Njie. In September, the NCAA banned three players from Fresno State and San Jose State for betting on their own games.

Naturally, amidst all this, deals with sportsbooks have exploded. In April, the NCAA agreed to a deal with Genius Sports to directly provide data to sportsbooks for betting purposes on championship events, such as the men’s and women’s March Madness tournaments. Conferences are able to enter into separate deals with sports books, and many have already taken advantage of that.

The Problem At Hand

Throughout society, we’re seeing a push towards sports gambling being normalized and accepted. In 2023, I laid out that sports betting was already drawing huge numbers:

We’re also seeing record numbers of people betting on sports. The same Addiction Center piece says that the number of people using sportsbooks doubled in 2021, and now sits at 12% of Americans. The American Gaming Association reported that 39.2 million Americans placed a legal sports wager in 2023. A November 2022 Harris poll showed that 71% of sports bettors put money on games on a weekly basis, and an even more concerning 20% put money on games every day. - Griffin Olah, College sports have a gambling problem, Dec. 20, 2023

It’s only gotten worse since then. For many sportsbooks, Q4 of 2024 was the most lucrative on record, raking in $13.07 billion over the course of last year. A February study by St. Bonaventure University showed that 48 percent of men aged 18 to 49 years old have an account with at least one sportsbook.

We’re seeing more and more people utilizing sports betting. And that means more and more people are starting to be taken in by gambling, which is highly addictive. A study done by researchers at UC San Diego showed that, since the introduction of online sportsbooks, web searches looking for gambling addiction assistance have increased by 61 percent. Similar jumps were seen in states with legalized sports gambling, while states that haven’t allowed it are not seeing those same concerns.

It’s clear that sports betting could be bordering on a public health crisis. It needs more regulation, more research. But I’m not someone in the field that’s able to talk about that, so we’ll focus on what I do know: athletics administration.

Right now, in the wake of the newest NBA betting scandal, sports are being looked at under the most powerful of microscopes. Every single move is being analyzed, bet on, and reacted to. In an increasingly more reactive society, that leads to many, many responses and reactions to each move.

Ahead of the 2025 basketball tournaments - one of the most heavily watched and bet on NCAA events - the NCAA released a “Don’t Be A Loser” campaign designed to cut down on online abuse towards athletes relating to lost wagers. During this campaign, the NCAA released data from a study indicating that one in three NCAA athletes reported online abuse stemming from bettors. 80 percent of that abuse was directed at participants in the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments.

Just over a month after that, the NCAA entered into the deal with Genius Sports to share their data with sportsbooks.

I’m not out here decrying that deal, in fact, I think it’s a good idea. Partnering with sportsbooks and gambling sites oftentimes allows for more oversight and potentially catching issues before they get out of hand.

But the NBA was the first to partner with sportsbooks, signing a deal with MGM in 2018 almost immediately after the Supreme Court put sports betting legality up to the states. And, it’s the NBA that’s entrenched in the biggest gambling scandal we’ve seen since Donaghy - who also was an NBA referee.

It’s clear that bad actors are trying to infiltrate sports. They’re buddying up with athletes and coaches, promising cuts of deals and providing big experiences. It happened with Billups, who apparently has been helping the mafia run illegal card games. It happened with Jones and Rozier and Porter, who helped make bets. It happened with the Eastern Michigan basketball players, the Fresno State players, the Dayton transfer, the San Jose State players, the Iowa State players, and many more. It happened with the translator for one of the biggest athletes in the world in Shohei Ohtani.

What are we doing to make it stop? Are we pulling off betting identifiers like ESPN did, dropping their ESPN Bet advertisement for their own sportsbook from the screen while discussing the latest NBA scandal? That’s not fooling anyone.

It’s time for sports leagues, college conferences and schools to take a good, hard look in the mirror. Since this is a college football newsletter, let’s focus there.

Our athletes that we watch are primarily 18-22 year old men. They, just recently, have had the floodgates opened to life-changing money in many situations. They are chasing dreams of college stardom, NFL draft status, and juggling the prospect of academics.

Do you think an extra $1,000 cut here or there would help them out? Absolutely it would. For sports betting bad actors, that’s a drop in the hat.

Yes, the NCAA tries to educate its athletes on the risk of sports betting. As I detailed in my prior gambling-related piece, I and everyone I worked with had to sign agreements that we understood the NCAA’s betting rules and would not bet on any NCAA-sponsored events. That extended to each and every athletes. That hasn’t stopped the issues from rolling in. In fact, since I left college athletics in 2022, it’s only gotten worse.

What are we going to do? Something needs to be done, because the situation is untenable. We can argue about NIL or revenue sharing or the transfer portal or coaching buyouts or realignment ruining college football. But none of those pose the threat that sports betting has. One scandal can destroy the sport.

It’s time to be proactive. Start banning advertising for sports betting just like we do with cigarettes. Start banning prop bets, like NCAA president Charlie Baker is advocating for. Do something.

Because if we don’t, this will only be a drop in the bucket.

Way back in 2007, Tim Donaghy’s scandal was painted as a sole rogue official making bad choices. Donaghy claimed otherwise and was going to wear a wire to NBA games for the FBI to wrangle up more conspirators. Somehow, before Donaghy was able to wear the wire, it all leaked to the press and the FBI was forced to go forward with what they had. Meaning, the Donaghy rogue official story became the official story.

Right now, we’re seeing the same things passing. Are we going to pretend like it’s just a few bad apples? Or are we going to realize that serious change is needed to clean this up. Legalization isn’t the issue, it’s regulation. And the NCAA proclaiming that betting is an existential threat all while expanding the ability for it’s vulnerable athletes to bet isn’t helping.

Pick a side, NCAA. It’s time for change.

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