By Jared Good
In a pair of incidents reminiscent of the point-shaving scandals that affected college basketball from the early 1950s to the late 1970s – culminating with the Boston College men’s basketball team’s involvement with the Mafia during the 1978-79 season, college sports is once again embroiled with a competition ethics issue.
University of Alabama
By most standards, the University of Alabama’s men’s baseball team has had a respectable season this year, attaining a national seed in the College World Series (#16). But with only a few weeks left in the season, the team’s optimistic outlook was thrown into disarray over a highly publicized incident involving their head coach. During a series with the #1 ranked LSU Tigers, a bet tracking company noticed unusual activity surrounding a Friday night game. U.S. Integrity alerted the NCAA to two large bets that had been placed on the game at the Cincinnati Red’s stadium, Great American Ballpark. These two bets both were placed on LSU, who had been a comfortable favorite prior to the game, and did end up winning the game.
Prior to the beginning of the game, the expected starter for Alabama was scratched for back tightness, being replaced by a less experienced pitcher whose last start was over a month prior on March 16th. Given the irregularities in the bets, Ohio and New Jersey ceased taking bets on Alabama’s baseball team. After a period of days investigating this, Alabama fired their coach, Brad Bohannon, for “among other things, violating the standards, duties and responsibilities expected of university employees.” Although that reasoning is not particularly clear on what that means, given the controversy surrounding the team and the dismissal from his post only a week later, many in the media speculated that it had something to do with the bets that were made.
University of Iowa
Shortly after the saga with Alabama, reports came out that numerous college athletes at the University of Iowa were under investigation for betting on sports in violation of the NCAA’s bylaws. As taken directly from the NCAA website, sports betting is viewed very negatively:
NCAA rules prohibit participation in sports wagering activities and from providing information to individuals involved in or associated with any type of sports wagering activities concerning intercollegiate, amateur, or professional athletics competition. Sports wagering has the potential to undermine the integrity of sports contests and jeopardizes the well-being of student-athletes and the intercollegiate athletics community. It also demeans the competition and competitors alike by spreading a message that is contrary to the purpose and meaning of “sport.” Sports competition should be appreciated for the inherent benefits related to participation of student-athletes, coaches, and institutions in fair contests, not the amount of money wagered on the outcome of the competition.
In its investigation, Iowa confirmed that 26 current student athletes had violated the sports wagering prohibition of the NCAA. Beyond this foundation level announcement, Iowa did not provide any information on which athletes were found to be wagering, what type of interaction that they are permitted to engage in with their respective teams, or what steps the university will take to address concerns on educating their athletes about policies against sports wagering.
The state of Iowa has a large sports betting market, with fiscal year 2022 amounting to a $2.5 billion industry, or approximately $2.5 million per day. With such a robust industry, the state has attempted to establish the necessary guardrails to prevent student-athletes from being able to wager on college athletics. Betting companies have also taken a proactive approach to prevent student-athletes from betting on college sports. FanDuel asks users for the last four digits of their social security number, date of birth and/or their mailing addresses.
A former Iowa men’s basketball player described his encounters with attempting to use sportsbook apps. In an interview on a podcast, he detailed that the company views him as a professional athlete, so he is unable to make bets on DraftKings.
The NCAA makes use of a three-tiered categorization for determining the severity and requisite discipline for violations:
The most severe category is when an athlete’s betting activity is “designed to influence the outcome of an intercollegiate contest.” These cases carry recommended sentences of permanent loss of eligibility. The Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission has indicated there is no evidence of this type of activity in this investigation.
The middle tier includes “any sports wagering activity through the internet, a bookmaker or a parlay card.” The NCAA guidelines recommend beginning the analysis with a “sit-a-season/charge-a-season” penalty — that means an athlete found in violation would miss a full season and lose that year of eligibility.
The guidelines also call for staff to “review cases on an individual basis to determine whether an alternative withholding condition is appropriate” for the second-tier violations.
“All other violations” fall into the third tier, where the recommended suspension depends on how much an athlete bets.
If the athlete spends less than $25, there is no suspension recommended. But more than $500 would line up with a “sit-a-season/charge-a-season” condition. In between are ranges for missing 10 percent, 30 percent, and 50 percent of the season.
These penalties are solely where the Indianapolis-based college sports governing body recommends to “begin its withholding analysis” — so actual decisions may vary.
As Iowa has not disclosed any of the information on what type of transactions were made or the types of the bets, it is impossible to know what type of consequences may arise within the school. The total complaint listed 111 individuals under suspicion for sports wagering, in addition to the 26 student-athletes. According to Iowa, the majority of the remaining individuals were a mixture of student-staff, former student-athletes, or those who had no connection to the university itself.
Expert Weighs In
These two incidents are very different in the immediate impact that was seen as a result. The betting scandal at Alabama was headline news with a major institutional investigation in collaboration with various betting companies. The severity was immediately seen as the head coach of the baseball team was fired in the midst of a decent season. Within the investigation, it was reported that Bohannon was connected with the bets that were wagered.
To better understand the impacts of how changes to the legal framework effects those working in collegiate athletes, we reached out to Robert Boland, of Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, LLP.
Besides his “regular” job at Shumaker, Boland is a professor at Seton Hall Law School. He also has deep experience on the university side, having served as Penn State University’s Athletics Integrity Officer for several years, prior to joining Shumaker.
Boland noted that such scandals could become a recurring theme at colleges that do not have sufficient guardrails in place to prevent such scandals, thus tarnishing the reputation of the institution and its overall viability to remain as a credible party. Given the NCAA’s existential threats to its existence playing out within the judicial system, colleges have been forced to work within the framework of a patchwork state legislative system, where some states authorize wagering on sports and others do not. Compared to professional leagues, the college ranks have a less strenuous set of protections due to a fundamental lack of understanding on how to manage it, according to Boland. Fully authorized sports betting is a relatively new concept within the United States, only becoming authorized when PASPA was struck down by the Supreme Court in Murphy.
Boland suggests that such shocks to the system have shown the need for training and developing frameworks within institutions themselves for monitoring and snuffing out any potential issue with sports wagering before it becomes a threat. “Preparation is key,” he noted during the conversation, and it is truly the best defensive method that any program could take to get ahead of the curve. He added that it is important to remember that institutions have limited budgets so it is hard for them to manage all their risks, regardless of how prepared they may be. So foundationally, schools tend to be on their backfoot in their mitigation efforts. According to Boland, there needs a wholesale effort top-to-bottom, to ensure every level of an institution is trained and understanding of threats.
Applying this idea to the Alabama and Iowa cases, Boland suggested that it is impossible to say with absolute certainty that the situations would have been different. However, with the guardrails in place this could have been caught quicker before any damage was done. Alabama presents an interesting case, as the state itself has no form of legalized gambling (not even a state lottery). So theoretically, it may have merely not considered gambling to have been a major concern among the other various legal issues that the school has recently faced. Given this perceived lack of immediate harm, the compliance office may have simply not taken the time to train the officers to detect and take corrective and/or disciplinary actions quickly, stated Boland.
U.S. Integrity
The discussion with Boland also touched on U.S. Integrity, which is the company that detected the unusual betting activities that prefaced the dismissal of Alabama’s head coach. This company provides a valuable resource for any collegiate compliance department, as it helps train the compliance officer to monitor and discern any potential manipulations of a money line. This is key when a school attempts to take a count on the sports at their institution that would be susceptible to betting, which extends far beyond the usual suspects of football and men’s basketball.
Given the NCAA’s current status, Boland noted that with the absence of a more consistent framework between the states, individual colleges and conferences are going to have to take the reins and establish a system that works and can be easily monitored. The incidents above and Boland’s analysis suggest that college sports has not been prepared for the storm that is approaching. Even with such preparation, the most trained parties may still not be able to discern a manipulation where athletes collude among sports on stats or events that would be impossible to be privy to unless one was aware of the plan.
In a post-Murphy legal landscape, patchwork legislation across the country makes enforcement by the NCAA that much more difficult. As the investigations at these two institutions continue, it will be interesting to see whether there will be more evidence of wagering uncovered or what systems, if any, were in place that were supposed to prevent such acts.
