On April 28 the Lead1 Association, an athletic director group, hosted a webinar to educate athletic departments about college sports gambling. At the end of the hour, the four gambling experts presenting to the group were asked to give a percentage chance that there would be a major betting scandal in college sports within the next three years. All four panelists agreed: There was a 100 percent chance one would happen soon.
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Later that day in Cincinnati, a person placed a suspicious bet on an Alabama–LSU baseball game. Within minutes, it was reported by an operator at the sportsbook and flagged by U.S. Integrity, a monitoring service that works with almost every major sports league and sportsbook. Less than a week later, Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon was fired. Two people briefed on the investigation told The Athletic it was due to Bohannon’s connection to the wagering activity. A person familiar with the investigation said there was no evidence that any athletes were involved.
From one perspective, a betting scandal involving a sitting head coach represents a massive controversy. But from the perspective of many in the gambling industry, this discovery was a good thing. It meant the tools in place to detect suspicious wagers were successful.
“I do feel like this particular story has gotten more media attention because it involves a coach,” said U.S. Integrity president Matt Holt, who was among the members of the Lead1 panel who said a scandal would happen.
The Alabama situation comes just weeks after five NFL players were penalized for violating the league’s policy on sports betting: Three players were suspended indefinitely for betting on NFL games, and two were suspended six games for betting on non-NFL games from inside the team facility. The loose and far-reaching structure of college sports presents a different challenge than the professional ranks. Can college sports protect its personnel and keep control over the credibility of its product in the age of legalized sports betting? It has never been easier to track, but it has also never been easier to bet.
“The system worked,” said Louisiana Gaming Control Board chair Ronnie Johns of the Alabama baseball case. “We have to protect the integrity of sports wagering or the system will crater.”
Concern about gambling’s impact on college sports is not new. 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.
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The Supreme Court’s 2018 decision to end the federal ban on sports betting in most states opened the floodgates of possibility. The American Gaming Association reported $7.5 billion wagered through commercial sports betting in 2022, a 72 percent increase from 2021. Sports leagues and college athletic departments, eager to get in on a new advertising revenue stream, signed sponsorship deals with sportsbooks.
Now the tools, regulators and guidelines work to keep things from spinning out of control. The MAC partnered with sports betting information firm Genius Sports last year to handle its statistical data and work as its integrity service. The SEC, Big 12 and Pac-12 are among the college sports groups that have contracted with U.S. Integrity, which was founded in 2018. The company, which also partners with the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB and UFC, works with sportsbooks to monitor numerous factors that could generate a red flag, such as an abnormally large bet or the history of a bettor and their account. If a red flag pops up in U.S. Integrity’s computer system or a sportsbook reports suspicious activity, warnings go out to state boards and sportsbooks to look into it.
Holt said his company’s system flags 15 to 18 incidents per month, resulting in an average of 10 suspensions or arrests per month. The number of red flags has increased in recent years but remained consistent proportionally as the number of states allowing sports betting rose. None of this tracking was possible a decade ago.
“I’ve been concerned about (gambling) for a long time,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said last month at College Football Playoff meetings, before the Alabama controversy broke. “… 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.”
A scandal happening in college baseball was not a surprise to people in the gambling world. While large-scale bets around the biggest sporting events like March Madness and the College Football Playoff garner the most public attention, smaller sports are equally vulnerable. A large bet on a low-profile game instantly raises suspicions at the sportsbook level.
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“You learn there’s a lot more gambling on volleyball, softball, baseball,” Sankey said last month.
Holt said college softball has seen a spike in money wagered after March in recent years because the softball season runs beyond the NCAA men’s basketball tournament’s early-April conclusion and just as the NBA and NHL move into their postseasons. Bettors need new action, and smaller sports provide new opportunities.
“A big misnomer is that these match-fixing or game-manipulation or misuse of insider information schemes are big multi-million dollar schemes. That’s the biggest misnomer of all,” Holt said. “Oftentimes, these are a couple thousand dollars with student-athletes who are in a vulnerable position at the time. It’s almost never some multi-million-dollar scheme. It’s almost insignificant money, like $1,500, $1,200 to manipulate certain portions of matches of the activity or to provide certain information not available to the public.”
The rise of prop bets and in-game betting opens up far more possibilities of scandal, anything from a quarterback throwing an interception to missed free throws. Holt said e-sports and tennis are the biggest outliers; tennis gamblers can bet point-by-point.
“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 Lead1 panel. “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.”
In 2018, English soccer player Bradley Wood was banned from the sport for six years after a tribunal ruled that he intentionally committed two yellow card fouls and had told people ahead of time. Winning bets on him picking up the fouls paid out around 10,000 British pounds. Prop bets are one area where a real-time data firm like Genius Sports working directly with leagues provides enormous value.
“Going through the authenticated source is faster and more accurate,” MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher said.
“As long as we get the data, we can monitor it,” Holt said.
The NCAA does not allow gambling on any sport sponsored by the association. Last fall, Virginia Tech linebacker Alan Tisdale was suspended for six games after self-reporting that he’d bet on the NBA Finals and didn’t realize it wasn’t allowed. The suspension was initially nine games but lowered to six after appeal.
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It was legal for Tisdale to bet on the NBA on FanDuel in Virginia. There was no indication he had a gambling problem. Does that harsh of a penalty still fit in an environment where the International Center for Responsible Gambling says 75 percent of college students have placed some kind of bet within the last year?
“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 NFL, with its strong monitoring capabilities, has come down hard. Atlanta Falcons receiver Calvin Ridley was suspended for the entire 2022 season after betting on NFL games.
“The NFL taking the stance they are, the best deterrent is to take stern action,” Holt said. “Going forward, you’ll see less and less NFL players getting caught because so many are now.”
It’s an issue the NCAA may look at more closely. New NCAA president Charlie Baker told athletic directors at a Lead1 event in Dallas last month that the NCAA will conduct two surveys on gambling: one on the gambling numbers among the general population aged 18-25 and then another in the fall on the gambling numbers for college athletes. A 2016 survey by the NCAA reported that 24 percent of male college athletes admitted to wagering on sports within the previous year, back when it was still illegal outside of Nevada.
“This is just one piece of the puzzle,” Baker said. “The other part I’m concerned about is the consequences and pressure this puts on student-athletes.”
Baker said his conversations with athletes since taking the job this year have highlighted the mental health concerns of interacting with angry fans on social media. “You start thinking about, what’s going to happen to some of these kids when they make or miss a shot that changes a line in a sporting event?” he said.
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In March, TCU basketball player Damion Baugh received a flood of angry social media messages when his buzzer-beating shot against Gonzaga in the NCAA Tournament didn’t change the winner but caused TCU to cover a four-point spread. Conferences and schools have contacted the FBI to track down violent threats to other athletes following games in recent years.
I Don’t Get How Y’all Mad Because I Played Until The Last Buzzer🤦🏾♂️Proud Of My Team And We Taught To Fight Until The End……Nobody Told Y’all To Bet🤷🏾♂️
— DAM10N BAUGH (@_swaggyd10_) March 20, 2023
The NCAA’s strict betting rules stand in contrast to the open advertising of sports gambling around college sports. Game broadcasts are frequently littered with commercials for sportsbooks. In 2020, the NCAA lifted its ban on holding championship events in Las Vegas. Several colleges signed lucrative sponsorship agreements worth millions of dollars with those sportsbooks, including Maryland and Colorado with PointsBet and Michigan State and LSU with Caesars. After securing its Caesars deal, LSU athletics sent out a promotional signup code to its large Geaux-Mail fan email list, which included many people under 21, the legal gambling age in Louisiana. The school received backlash for the promotion.
But schools have begun to back away. 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. The code is a collection of guidelines, not binding rules.
The next day, PointsBet and Colorado announced the end of their partnership, though the Boulder Daily Camera reported the decision was not impacted by the AGA code update. A Maryland spokesperson confirmed to The Athletic its PointsBet partnership has also ended; a Maryland state law prohibiting such partnerships has been sent to the governor’s desk. A Michigan State spokesperson told The Athletic its Caesars partnership was inactivated in early April, removing signage and promotion, and the process to officially end it is underway. Caesars also recently took down its signage at LSU. The school did not respond to a request for comment on whether that deal is officially ending as well.
“Part of this is codifying that people know these kinds of partnerships are not going to be perpetuated,” said American Gaming Association senior vice president Casey Clark. “It’s also a reflection of where the industry had already gone. There weren’t that many. There wasn’t a huge appetite for them.”
The reining-in of gambling promotion is underway elsewhere in the world, too. In April, the English Premier League banned jersey sponsorships with gambling brands, beginning in 2026.
It’s about credibility. Leagues need confidence that games are legitimate. Sportsbooks need suspicious activity to be caught for the sake of their business. Many people believe college football should implement public injury reports like the NFL and NBA — far more people around a college program have access to inside information, and secretive college football coaches often share the bare minimum with the public.
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“Injury reports were created to disrupt and deter misuse of insider information,” Holt said in an email. “I believe all leagues, college or pro, that have regulated wagering in them should also have regularly scheduled injury and information reporting.”
A new tool from U.S. Integrity called Prohibet will help track betting from players and coaches, too. Launched last Friday in beta form, the program allows a league or team to submit a list of players, coaches, staff and others into an encrypted database. If any of those names attempt a bet with a domestic sportsbook that uses U.S. Integrity, it’ll instantly be flagged.
“It’s going to be a really nice thing to have,” Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor said.
Two weeks before K-State played Alabama in the Sugar Bowl, Taylor got a call from U.S. Integrity. The game’s betting line had taken a significant jump in Alabama’s favor because quarterback Bryce Young and linebacker Will Anderson announced they would play in the game. The movement was flagged by the system, and the parties involved checked to make sure there was nothing more to it.
A Friday interview with Holt was interrupted briefly due to a call from the SEC office. Holt and his company are in-demand in this new world, and college sports is figuring out its place in it. Is the Alabama baseball controversy, on the heels of the NFL suspensions, a sign of things to come or an example of how the legalized system’s guardrails work? It might be both.
“A lot of people are saying this is a cautionary tale, but I say no; this is a perfect example of why regulated sports betting works,” Holt said. “We’d never catch these individuals if they’re with offshore books or illegal bookmakers. The (sportsbook) operators deserve so much credit. If they didn’t report first here, we wouldn’t get the report, it doesn’t get to the Ohio Casino Control Commission.
“It worked because everybody participates and collaborates together.”
(Photo: Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
