Update: More than two-thirds of NCAA schools voted to overturn a rule change that would have allowed gambling on professional sports, the NCAA announced Friday evening.
There’s been a lot of pearl-clutching around the NCAA’s decision to permit athletes and athletic department staff to bet on pro sports if it’s legal in their state, a policy change that will go into effect Saturday unless two-thirds of D-I schools vote to rescind it by 5 pm ET.
Thursday night, CNN reported that only 188 of 361 schools had submitted requests to block the change, well short of the 241 votes required.
Tabling the change would be more show than substance, an easy way for those still grappling with the impact of legalization to look as if they’re taking a stand at a time when players from the NBA and MLB and a handful of D-I mid-major basketball players have been accused of rigging player prop bets.
They’d actually be taking a stand against progress.
There’s a reasonable debate to be had around whether opening the spigots on legal online sportsbooks is good for sports, or society -- and especially whether it’s good for college sports and college-aged students, athletes or otherwise.
But a college quarterback betting on the Chiefs on a regulated sportsbook app really isn’t the issue. A college quarterback betting on college games using a friend’s account, a campus bookie or an unregulated offshore, where his activity can’t be tracked or monitored, is the threat college administrators should address.
A 2024 NCAA survey of more than 20,000 college athletes found that 21.5 percent of male student athletes reported that they had bet on sports in the last 12 months, with about 10% saying they bet monthly. Among D-I athletes, the overall number drops to 12%, with 5% betting monthly and 2% betting weekly. A 2023 NCAA survey of college-aged non-athletes showed 58 percent bet.
Two-thirds of athletes who said they bet on sports did so through a legal sportsbook app.
You could read this as evidence that the policy is working. Some schools use a monitoring service that supports the prohibition, blocking athletes and staff from placing bets at legal sites using their own names. It’s a sound strategy.
But wouldn’t it make even more sense to use the software to block only college betting while permitting them to bet on the NFL and NBA, reducing the likelihood that they’d find their way to illegal offshores and campus bookies?
Not one of the recent arrests or NCAA eligibility revocations stemmed from a player betting on another sport. Most were the result of inside information, or manipulation, around player props. The NCAA has successfully lobbied to keep those off the board on college games in 15 states, but sportsbooks in about half of legalized states still offer them.
That’s a substantive issue that college administrators should be concerned about.
So is transparent injury reporting, a policy college programs were woefully slow to embrace.
Online sports betting had been legalized across eight of the 11 states in the Big Ten’s footprint by the time it became the first conference to require its football and basketball programs to release injury reports in 2023, a practice meant to keep bettors from benefiting from inside information -- and players and support staff from being tempted to leak it.
The SEC did the same last year. The ACC and Big 12 didn’t get around to it until this year, seven years after the first legal online sports bets outside Nevada were placed.
The NCAA will require injury reports at the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments for the first time in March.
A tad late, to be sure, but certainly substantive.
That should be a focus. The increased risk of gambling addiction among college students should be a focus. Education on integrity risks should be a focus.
But I would much rather the college quarterback who wants to bet on the Chiefs on Sunday do so on his own account than someone else’s, which he might also use to take the over in his own game next Saturday.
