When Kentucky’s head coaches gathered for a meeting this month, athletic director Mitch Barnhart highlighted a message about the movement portal, name, symbol and image, hiring, new services or anything else that might be the ultimate urgency of the day.
Gambling in school sports in the news.
As a growing number of states legalize sports (Kentucky’s law goes into effect June 28), expect more headlines, especially if NCAA regulations remain the same.
Current regulations prohibit participants (players, athletics, and coaches) from betting on any NCAA-sponsored games at the secondary, school, and professional levels. This includes sharing data, such as updating a star player’s injury prestige for game betting purposes.
Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon was fired earlier this month after being linked to suspicious bets in the April 28 Crimson Tide game against LSU at the Great American Ballpark Sportsbook in Cincinnati. Ongoing investigations into 41 combined Iowa and Iowa state athletes and their gaming activities were also announced. previous this month.
Barnhart to make sure their coaches communicate enough about NCAA regulations to make sure they and the athletes they train understand.
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But the NCAA wants to re-examine its rules of the game. It’s no longer taboo or complicated to make, especially on school campuses where 75% of students have bet on sports in the past year, according to the International Center for Responsible Gaming.
College football and school basketball are the only sports banned because they have the greatest chance of being compromised. Professional sports should be fair play. The same goes for Olympic sports in college, as there is no mass market or appetite for betting on those sports.
Trying to ban everything is a burden on an already overburdened compliance staff.
Since 2004, the NCAA has commissioned a study every four years to control sports betting. The last comprehensive survey from 2016 (the 2020 study was halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic) reported that 24% of male athletes and 5% of female athletes admitted to betting on sports in the past year.
Those effects occurred long before the Supreme Court paved the way for states to legalize sports betting in 2018 and a flood of legal sports betting followed. It’s a bet that those percentages have increased over the past seven years.
NCAA President Charlie Baker acknowledges the challenge. One of his first moves after taking office in March to pass a survey of 18- to 22-year-olds to gauge their sports betting habits. A “more comprehensive” national survey of NCAA athletes is planned for the 2023-24 school year.
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This is a new problem.
City College of New York (CCNY), the only school to win the NIT and NCAA national championship in the same season, could simply be blue-blooded school basketball if seven players hadn’t been accused of game-fixing in 1951. scholarships for all public universities in New York. Boston College, Tulane, Arizona State and Northwestern are also among the schools that have been compromised in the past.
Most of the worst cases concerned players taking cash to fix games because they didn’t have another to win it under amateur regulations at the time. NIL is reducing its vulnerability now.
The 2016 NCAA study found that most sports involving school athletes are low-risk: 79 percent of men and 95 percent of women surveyed lost less than $50 per day.
And a school player betting $20 on the Steelers to win the Super Bowl is a big risk for school sports.
Preventing school athletes from playing, whether in a fantasy football league or placing a bet through a sportsbook, is almost preventing the main team in the fight against betting from being awareness and education.
Rachel Newman Baker, who is the Executive Director of Associate Sports in UK Compliance, spent 12 years in the NCAA before moving to Lexington in 2013. Part of his time at the NCAA was spent fighting sports betting, which he says he has replaced since the early 2000s because of the status and its ubiquity.
“If we’re expected to spare them absolutely bad stuff or scandal, then we’re starting in place,” Baker said. The factor is playing. “
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When the existing NCAA statutes were written, the number of states in which a stop could be made on a sports e-book was limited to Nevada and a few others. Now, Kentucky is one of 38 states that have legalized sports betting.
Someone who needs action no longer has to park their money on a foreign online site that makes it tricky to gather profits. There has been a proliferation of phone apps that make it as undeniable as making a call.
That’s what brought in Virginia Tech linebacker Alan Tisdale. He placed legal bets on the 2022 NBA Finals with the FanDuel app. The Commonwealth of Virginia legalized sports betting in 2021; Tisdale is of legal age and did not bet on his sport.
None of his bets exceeded $5 and he won a total of $41, according to The Athletic. When Tisdale learned of his mistake, he reported it to the university. The NCAA still suspended him for games, which were later reduced to six on appeal.
“Here’s the challenge: OK, we want to teach them about sports betting, but we also want to teach them about performance-enhancing drugs,” Baker said. “And we also want to teach them on social media. And we also want to teach them about the monetary education and the Alston cash they receive. And then we also have to teach them how to communicate with the media, you know what I mean?
No matter how many conversations there are on school campuses, without making their rules, the NCAA is heading down a narrow path in which it will be increasingly difficult to avoid problems.
Join sportswriter C. L. Brown on clbrown1@gannett. com and him on Twitter on @CLBrownHoops.