Gambling has always had a place in professional sports, but in recent years, it’s become even more prevalent.
On Thursday, two prominent figures in the NBA, Portland Trail Blazers’ head coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, were arrested along with more than 30 others in two criminal cases alleging “sprawling schemes to rake in millions by rigging sports bets and poker games involving Mafia families,” according to The Associated Press.
Earlier this month, the NCAA Division I Administrative Committee gave the green light to a proposal allowing student-athletes and administrative staff to bet on professional sports.
The change was not made to promote gambling, the committee said, but rather allowed “the NCAA, the conferences, and the member schools to focus on protecting the integrity of college games while, at the same time, encouraging healthy habits for student-athletes who choose to engage in betting activities on professional sports,” D1 committee chair Josh Whitman said.
Although student-athletes are not able to bet on their own competitions, something that happened as recently as September prior to the rule change, the gambling culture could become increasingly prevalent among college teams with them now being allowed to engage in betting on pro sports.
In the NBA scandal, Billups was charged with participating in a conspiracy to fix high-stakes card games, was Rozier was accused in a separate scheme to “concoct fraudulent bets by exploiting confidential information about NBA athletes and teams.”
Although there’s been a long history of match fixing in sports, the charge on Rozier magnifies how the modern betting landscape, which includes prop bets and over/unders, makes illegal wagering and trading insider information harder to detect. It also confirms to us that despite the NBA having full-time compliance oversight aimed at preventing cases like this, it can still happen, so what would prevent it from happening in the NCAA?
We saw an example of it last summer, when the Notre Dame men’s swimming program was suspended for the 2024-25 due to gambling allegations.
The NCAA’s intent may be to modernize its policies, but as gambling becomes more common among student-athletes, the realities of compromised competition remain and the line between participation and influence grows increasingly thin.