On Friday, I wrote about a series of scandals that plagued the University of Alabama over the past few months. One of them involved suspicious betting activity around a baseball game between Alabama and Louisiana State University (LSU). As a result of a six-day investigation, Alabama fired baseball coach Brad Bohannon.
The suspicious betting activity took place in Ohio (curiously not Alabama or Louisiana), and it was significant enough to warrant the Ohio Casino Control Commission to issue an order banning “the acceptance of any wagers on University of Alabama baseball effective immediately,” according to ESPN.
“Sportsbook surveillance video indicated that the person who placed the bets was communicating with Bohannon at the time, multiple sources with direct information about the investigation told ESPN,” the network’s David Purdum reported. The resulting investigation culminated in Bohannon’s firing.
“The system worked,” said Louisiana Gaming Control Board chair Ronnie Johns, according to The Athletic. “We have to protect the integrity of sports wagering or the system will crater.”
Interestingly enough, a group of collegiate athletic department staff members met for a webinar with experts on the gambling industry on the day of the game where the suspicious betting took place. When someone asked the panelists what the chances of a major college gambling scandal erupting in the near future, every single panelist said 100%.
Related: Can the Crimson Tide Get Its Athletic Scandals Under Control?
The college sports world has seen a ton of changes in recent years with the advent of the transfer portal and name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals that allow college athletes to earn money, but an age-old problem is rearing its head again in the form of modern-day sports betting.
“Concern about gambling’s impact on college sports is not new,” writes The Athletic’s Chris Vannini. “There were famous basketball betting scandals at Boston College in the 1970s, Tulane in the 1980s, and Arizona State in the 1990s, the latter of which was part of a 2021 Netflix documentary. Washington head football coach Rick Neuheisel was fired in 2003 in part for participating in NCAA Tournament pools.”
The landscape of sports betting has changed drastically in recent years. The Supreme Court ended the ban on sports gambling in most states in 2018, and the prevalence of apps and websites dedicated to betting on sports at any level has made it easier for the average American to take part.
These days, people can bet on more than winners, losers, and point spreads. Modern gambling provides opportunities for bettors to wager on individual athletes’ performance or place parlays on things that have nothing to do with the games themselves. Needless to say, these factors have turned sports betting into a multi-billion-dollar industry.
Colleges have gotten in on the action, partnering with sportsbooks for sponsorship deals, although that tide may be turning away from close relationships between schools and sportsbooks.
“On March 28, the American Gaming Association updated its Responsible Marketing Code for Sports Wagering to prohibit college partnerships (outside of alumni groups or responsible gambling awareness initiatives) and prohibit NIL deals for college athletes, among other changes,” Vannini writes. “The code is a collection of guidelines, not binding rules.”
Athletic conferences are also working with integrity firms to keep an eye on betting surrounding college athletics. It was one of those integrity firms, Las Vegas-based U.S. Integrity, that alerted the Southeastern Conference (SEC) to the suspicious activity involving Alabama’s baseball program.
“I’ve been concerned about (gambling) for a long time,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey told reporters at the beginning of this year. “…We have to be more and more intentional about education, clarity of cautions, and being sophisticated in our monitoring. We’ve continued to work to do that.”
Sankey said that it’s not just the big sports like football and basketball that have become targets for betting. “You learn there’s a lot more gambling on volleyball, softball, baseball,” Sankey said last month.
For players or coaches to fix an outcome doesn’t take a lot of manipulation or collusion, and that’s what makes incidents like what happened with the Crimson Tide baseball team particularly insidious.
“You don’t have to fix a game. That’s passé,” Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council of Problem Gambling, said on the panel last month. “You just have to fix a particular play. It might be missing a shot, hitting a shot, getting a foul on a particular play, something that is utterly undetectable.”
Related: The NCAA Hands Down Its First NIL-Related Violation
Add to all of this the potential for gambling addiction. It’s already happening among college athletes, who often suffer in silence out of fear of facing NCAA penalties.
“When we talk to college student-athletes who have gambling problems, they almost unanimously report they did not come forward because the only remedy they saw in NCAA rules was a loss of eligibility,” Whyte said. “Unless you have a policy of some sort of safe harbor reporting, you’re not going to find student-athletes with gambling problems until there’s a scandal. It creates an enormous disincentive for the people to come forward before they’re caught.”
The NCAA is conducting studies about gambling addictions among athletes, but non-athletes are susceptible to gambling problems as well. We’ve already seen how college students can get themselves into deep debt because of the easy availability of credit cards on campus, and the explosion of sports betting has led to similar problems.
“According to a recent study, gambling addiction among college students is on the rise,” Digital Information World reported last fall. “The study, which was conducted by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, found that the number of college students who suffer from gambling addiction has increased by nearly 50 percent in the last decade.”
“On college campuses, researchers estimate that 75% of college students gambled during the past year, with 18% gambling on a weekly basis,” according to the New York State Problem Gambling Resource Center. “For some, this gambling is not recreational, with up to 6% of college students reporting a serious gambling problem.”
Colleges, conferences, and the NCAA need to work together to keep this gambling issue from getting out of hand. Just like the craziness that has stemmed out of NIL and the transfer portal, sports betting stands to change college athletics forever, but will it be for better or worse? Time will tell.
