Interview with NCAA president Charlie Baker on the state of sports betting

One-on-one with Charlie Baker

In just a few years, sports betting has gone from an occasional fixture in Las Vegas to a fixture in American life. Just one tap on your phone. Fixed program for each advertising break. Every game has a storyline.

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As the gambling industry proliferates, so do the knock-on effects: social media abuse, integrity issues, athlete pressure, and a whole new culture around winning and losing and prop betting. College sports are at the center of this storm. So I spoke with NCAA president Charlie Baker (no relation) about what he’s seeing, what worries him and what happens next.

Let’s dig deeper…

Kendall Baker: Charlie, thank you so much for your time. I want to start with some pretty staggering numbers. According to a recent NCAA study, 36 percent of Division I men’s basketball players reported experiencing social media abuse related to sports betting within the past year, while 29 percent reported interacting with a student on campus who placed a bet on their team. What was your first reaction when you heard the news?

Charlie Baker:

After the appointment was announced in December 2022, I went out and visited approximately 1,000 student-athletes on campus, mostly in and around New England, where I live. Basically just say, “Tell me what happened.”

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A lot of those conversations were about sports betting, especially the abuse and harassment that comes with it, so when I got to the NCAA, one of the first things we did was survey the 18- to 22-year-old sports betting population. I wanted to see if the anecdotes I heard were true; many of the kids who play college sports have their peers do bet on it in a very significant way.

The answer is, yes, a large number of people between the ages of 18 and 22 — not to mention adults — bet on college sports. These are the kids that student-athletes interact with, take classes with, eat in the cafeteria with, etc.

When I was in college, it would be a really weird day if we had a game and I didn’t have classmates and friends asking me, “What’s going to happen tonight?” But this is just small talk. Now, it’s coaching and inside information, and I think that creates a whole different dynamic for athletes, especially those competing at a high level.

“Mobile phones have changed everything”

knowledge base: Legalizing sports betting is an issue you addressed as governor of Massachusetts and now is an issue you are addressing as NCAA president. So I’m just curious, what do you personally think about sports betting and the cultural impact it has?

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The first time this issue was debated and discussed when I was governor, probably way back in 2018 or so, most people thought it was going to be a casino type of thing. You would go somewhere and bet on sports. Because everyone always goes to Vegas to bet on sports.

I don’t think anyone expected it to become as ubiquitous as DraftKings and FanDuel, especially creating phone-based opportunities for people to bet on just about anything. Think about parlays, which are really hard to do without technology and near-simultaneous betting opportunities.

So there’s so much going on about this technology that I think we can’t underestimate the growth and interest and access to these things. The phone changed everything. People just didn’t think about it at that time [in 2018] How quickly the whole thing will end up in the palm of your hand.

Look how many there are [sports betting] Do you see ads when you watch any kind of sporting event these days? I mean, this stuff is everywhere. I do believe that when something is illegal, people think twice before doing it. So you can’t underestimate the impact of all these ads [in making] Sports betting is socially acceptable.

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Prop betting issues

Proprietary betting has been at the center of the year’s biggest scandals (see: Joetae Porter and Terry Rozier in the NBA, Emmanuel Claes and Luis Ortiz in Major League Baseball), and it’s not hard to see why. Unlike bets tied to a team’s outcome, these bets depend on an individual player doing something specific, whether that’s scoring less than 10 runs or bowling instead of batting. This makes them easier to maneuver and more accessible to athletes.

knowledge base: Why do prop betting pose such a unique threat? How much betting-related harassment stems from these specific types of bets?

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Well, that’s definitely where most of the really aggressive harassment of kids comes from. The second thing is the pressure that underperforming proprietary bookmakers put on young people. I don’t think this is fully understood yet.

I mean, if you talk to the athletes who are competing, these programs often bet on a lot of things that happen during their games… They have classmates, school employees, friends from high school, all kinds of people putting all this social pressure on them.

They say, “Look, I don’t want you to lose the game, but just don’t score more than 20 points. Miss your first shot. Don’t hit your first free throw. Don’t catch your first pass.” It sounds easy and stressful to people who are trying to get their kids to do that.

Like, “Hey, I’m not asking you to do something terrible. I’m not asking you to throw the game away,” right? But what you’re asking them to do is not play the game the way they choose if their goal is to be a good teammate and win.

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I hate the fact that we find a whole bunch of young people doing this kind of thing and it sucks for everyone. But our message is, you know, “If you do this, we’re going to catch you.” We run a very large integrity monitoring program, probably the largest in the world. I’m not sure people will appreciate that. Reached more than 2.75 million athletes over the past five years.

knowledge base: Do you think we will have a nationwide ban on prop betting? There appears to be some momentum at the state level as more people become aware of the dangers prop betting poses to the integrity of the Games and athletes.

We did manage to get some states to change their rules, which I think is great. Now we’ve reached the point where even the sportsbooks themselves admit it [prop bets] is a problem because they changed the rules of the NBA and MLB games.

The biggest challenge has always been the fact that, for the most part, it’s regulated at the state level. The Senate held a hearing last year and some of them said, “Well, there are some interstate trade issues here that we should be concerned about.” But for the most part, they certainly looked at this more as a national issue. Frankly, I think a lot of states would probably rather make this a state issue.

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Protecting College Athletes

knowledge base: The NCAA is certainly not the only sports organization exploring the realities of legal sports betting. That said, do you feel a unique responsibility to protect athletes, given that they are more vulnerable to injury than professional athletes?

must. There’s a big difference between being a professional athlete with a lot of structure and a lot of advisors around you, and being a kid eating in the cafeteria. and study in the library. and go to class with classmates. And much more accessible for just about anything for that matter. So yes, of course, [we feel an added responsibility].

Let’s talk about scale here as well, shall we? I mean, there are 32 NFL teams, 30 MLB teams, 30 NBA teams, 32 NHL teams. I mean, it’s not even like a college athletic conference when you think about all the teams. We have football, men’s and women’s basketball, volleyball, baseball, ice hockey — we have a lot of high-profile sports.

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Prediction markets: the next frontier

Just as sports betting has become mainstream, a new, largely unregulated ecosystem is rising with it: prediction markets. They look like gambling, act like gambling, and operate in a similar space, but without the rules, transparency, or accountability that states require for sports betting. This vacuum worries Baker, who believes prediction markets are the next major flashpoint in the gambling world.

Prediction markets are not regulated at all. So, you know, California doesn’t currently allow sports betting, and prediction markets may have a definite ball to take over that space.

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You saw DraftKings and FanDuel pull out of the American Gaming Association… I’d like to conclude that a big part of their reason was that they were going to get into the prediction markets space. They can’t let these people dominate all the green spaces they currently don’t have access to.

It just says that unless someone takes action, the whole thing is going to get worse. Addressing this issue at the federal level is indeed challenging because it is still new and not yet fully formed. So, I mean, you’re basically talking about no rules, no oversight, nothing. This is disastrous for me. Not just for us, but for everyone.