At the end of a 70-page gambling indictment, each accusation more sordid than the last, delivers another crushing blow to college basketball with the overwhelming conclusion that we did this to ourselves.
No, we’re not placing six-figure bets on mid- to low-level college basketball games that raise suspicions from the authorities. We’re not the players who allegedly agreed to spend tens of thousands of dollars fixing the game. These are decisions made by individuals that violate the law, tarnish college basketball and shake the public trust.
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But what about as a society?
We ask for this. You bet we did.
Nearly eight years ago, many of us celebrated when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which essentially limited sports betting to Nevada. If you can bet on sports at a Las Vegas casino, why can’t you bet at a similar venue in New Jersey, Mississippi, or Ohio?
It seems like a victory for freedom and common sense, not to mention that casino operators are ready to capture new customers.
What have the rest of us actually won?
We win a steady stream of online sports betting ads. We have gained a generation of young gambling addicts who are emotionally and financially ill-equipped to cope with losing money on long-term bets. We have experienced disgraceful harassment from fans both at games and online against athletes who do not help them cash in on their bets. We win over subcultures like the six defendants named in the indictment who prey on young basketball players from low-profile teams, see their peers making money trading their names, images and likenesses, and are lured by the promise of easy money.
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In other words, we also lost something. Maybe a lot.
The volume and availability of gambling may have become too much. It has become all too easy to launch an app on your phone and have a frictionless experience of placing any bet at any time. The cost of making gambling so widely available is now clear. When PASPA collapsed and eventually brought sports betting to 39 states, we didn’t flip the switch as often as the stove.
You can educate young athletes about the dangers of match-fixing, warn them against gamblers, and even show those who fall into the trap examples of disqualification and legal trouble. It doesn’t matter. Put enough money in front of people and some people will inevitably think they can get away with it.
The college basketball scandal that came to light Thursday is just the latest to hit the U.S. since sports betting was legalized. (Photo: G Fiume/Getty Images)
(G Fiume via Getty Images)
It’s our fault. We open the floodgates and make it happen. If we are to continue to be a nation where gambling is available almost everywhere, we have to accept that the occasional scandal will be part of the deal.
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Is this worth the trade-off? Maybe.
Sports gambling is common in many other countries, and match-fixing scandals have occurred in almost every sport in almost every corner of the globe. In the UK you’re likely to pass a few betting shops when walking around any decent city, and there’s been a recent push for regulatory reform but no real action to shut them all down. The same may be true on our side of the Atlantic. Too many people have made too much money to go back.
But the uniqueness of American college sports is a real weakness.
College basketball is so popular that sportsbooks can reasonably offer and profit from betting on low-level games and player props. They just fill a need. At this point, however, we cannot deny the vulnerability of college athletes, especially those at small schools.
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It’s no coincidence that the game-fixers in this indictment first targeted players from the Chinese Basketball Association, then targeted players at Nicholls State, Tulane, Northwestern State, St. Louis State, LaSalle State, Fordham State, Robert Morris University, Southern Mississippi State, DePaul State, North Carolina A&T, Coppin State, New Orleans State, Kennesaw State, Eastern Michigan State and Abilene Christian State.
None of these college athletes make much, if any, money from zero. A school that few people pay attention to. A game that won’t attract anyone’s attention. They usually focus on the route of the first half, presumably to convince skeptical players that if they can perform to their full ability in the second half, then the first half performance wasn’t entirely unethical. For anyone who’s seen friends and former teammates sign huge no-pay contracts at more prestigious schools, it must be hard to say no when a middleman texts photos with stacks of cash.
Of course, the argument in favor of the current legal gambling environment is that they got caught. Unusual amounts of money bet on low-rate games sparked an investigation that resulted in 20 people, including former NBA player Antonio Blakeney, being charged in connection with the scheme. This is how it should work.
The question is therefore presented as choice A or B: is it generally better to legalize gambling and have a system that detects suspicious activity, or are you willing to go back to the days when gambling on the black market was untraceable? After all, we had gouging and match-fixing scandals long before college sports were legal almost everywhere.
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We should probably think of this as an open question, a conversation still evolving. The indictment covers 29 compromised games over two seasons, more than 12,000 of which were played in college basketball.
Is it too much to bear? Is it about what you expected? Or is this just the tip of the iceberg of a host of issues we’ll be dealing with in the coming years?
The answer is a matter of taste, but it would be foolish to think this is the last time we’ll see an indictment for recruiting a group of college athletes to fix games.
The hope, at least from the NCAA’s perspective, is that states will take action to restrict proprietary betting on college games, and the fallout from a federal investigation will scare everyone straight away. If both of those things happen, maybe college sports will have a chance to remain as honest and fair as we hope.
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But whatever happens in history during the first decade of widespread legal sports betting in the United States, we must understand that it is all a product of the choices we made as a society to bring it into our lives.
We wanted it, we got it, and the consequences are there for all to see.