The Kids Are Not Alright: Student athletes and the impact of legalized betting on college sports

This article was originally published in Sports Business Journal on April 3, 2024

Recently, a former LSU wide receiver was arrested on charges of illegal underage sport wagering. This followed last summer’s extensively reported criminal charges brought against seven current and former Iowa and Iowa State athletes. In the Iowa cases, the current athletes who wagered on NCAA-sanctioned sports also lost significant athletic eligibility.

These stories are unfortunately not uncommon. Sports gambling is massively growing, and its expanse is far-reaching, including into college athletics. In a 2023 letter to Congress, NCAA President Charlie Baker reported that the NCAA had found 175 infractions of its sports-betting policy since 2018, with 17 ongoing investigations.

While current public focus is primarily on college athletes’ ability to commercialize their name, image, and likeness rights, sports betting has been riding shotgun in college sports with the potential for serious disruption and damage. Indeed, not every college athlete is making NIL money, and with easy access to online sports betting and the corresponding ability to impact the results of a competition, college athletes are at risk of getting caught up in illegal sports betting — including as targets for those who might take advantage of them.

So how did we get here, and what can be done to protect student athletes and the integrity of college sports?

Recipe for trouble

Three factors appear to be driving the rise of sports betting and the corresponding risks for college athletes and athletics: (1) access, (2) advertising and (3) normalization. The ease of access is clear. Download a sports betting app on a mobile phone, enter in some information, and within minutes you can begin placing wagers. As for advertising, sports betting operators have nearly doubled their advertising spending from a reported $1 billion in 2021 to nearly $2 billion in 2023. Sports gambling ads constantly remind viewers of sports gambling opportunities. Several states, like New Jersey and Illinois, have begun regulating sports betting advertisements with a specific focus on the target age of consumers and the type of promotions that gambling companies can run.

Finally, cultural acceptance has normalized the way people — especially college-age kids — view sports betting. All U.S. major professional sports leagues have now embraced sports betting. Sports media outlets offer constant reminders of the betting lines in their coverage of games. Prominent former professional athletes and celebrities endorse sports betting companies and appear in their advertisements.

The state of college sports betting

This cultural entrenchment has both led and followed the spread of legalized sports gambling in the U.S. In the past five years, over 30 U.S. jurisdictions have legalized online sports betting, and all but five states allow daily fantasy sports.

Betting on college sports brings a mixed bag of rules and prohibitions among the state laws that permit it. An important distinction among states is whether betting is allowed on in-state college teams. Certain states, like Illinois and Delaware, prohibit betting on in-state college teams. While not eliminating the potential for violations, this type of prohibition somewhat reduces risk by limiting the games available to a student athlete for betting, including games involving the student athlete’s school.

Proposition (or “prop”) betting may carry unique risks in the college sports context. Prop bets are wagers on elements of sporting events other than the final outcome of the game (e.g. whether or not running back will have over 100 yards rushing). The elements of a prop bet are often within the sole control of an individual athlete, creating a heightened risk that such an athlete might be tempted, or coerced to manipulate his or her performance.

The rise of so-called “pick ’em-style” DFS — especially in states where sports betting is not allowed — may present similar problems. Pick’em-style DFS generally allows users to stake value on whether certain statistics are accumulated by multiple athletes (e.g. whether both Player 1 will score a touchdown, and whether Player 2 will accumulate more than 76 receiving yards). Pick’em-style operators maintain that their game play constitutes DFS, rather than sports betting, but state governments are increasingly skeptical. Still, the prevalence of the less-regulated pick ’em-style DFS carries the same temptation (and popularity) as the real thing.

Reducing risk

What can be done to prevent sports betting from interfering with the merits and integrity of college athletics? 

Recently, the NCAA announced a plan to advocate for changes to state laws and regulations on sports betting to better address problem gambling, protect student athletes from coercion and harassment to fix results, and ensure the integrity of collegiate sports competitions. The following seem like appropriate steps for relevant stakeholders to take:

• States that allow mobile sports betting could uniformly set age limits to 21 (see Kentucky, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Washington, D.C., and Wyoming, where 18 is the age limit).
• The states that allow for mobile DFS could uniformly set age limits to 21 (see Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, and Massachusetts — the only states to have done so).
• States should consider other measures to limit the ability of college athletes to engage in sports betting or limit the impact if they do (e.g., prohibiting college sports prop bets in sports betting or DFS).
• States might also consider the NCAA recommendations for enforcement (e.g., adopting penalties for anyone who harasses or coerces any student athlete in connection with sports betting).
• All stakeholders (i.e., NCAA, conferences, and schools) should rely on and promote the development of enhanced data analytics and monitoring programs that can help identify the participants in illegal activity and their locations.
• All those same stakeholders should implement, or upgrade existing, educational and support services and programs for student athletes, to fully inform them about the risks of sports betting in relation to their lives, well-being, and standing as student athletes.

Amid the current turmoil in college athletics, sports betting is a quietly ticking time bomb that deserves some serious attention from legislators, school and conference administrators, and anyone else who has an interest in student-athlete safety and well-being and the integrity of college sports.