NCAA President Baker issues statement regarding sports betting indictments in college athletics and calls on other states to ban risky bets.
On THURSDAY, NCAA President Charlie Baker released the following statement concerning indictments of sports betting in college athletics. The NCAA operates one of the largest integrity monitoring programs in the world and has implored declares to eliminate prop bets due to the integrity risks these bets pose. The Association also has no commercial partnership with any betting company of any kind.
Protecting the integrity of competition is of the utmost importance to the NCAA. We are grateful to law enforcement who work to detect and combat integrity issues and game manipulation in college sports.
The pattern of college basketball game integrity conduct revealed by law enforcement today is not entirely new information for the NCAA. Through helpful collaboration and with industry regulators, we have completed or initiated investigations into nearly all of the teams covered in today’s indictment.
Our law enforcement personnel have initiated sports betting integrity investigations into approximately 40 student-athletes from 20 schools over the past year. While some investigations are ongoing, 11 student-athletes from seven schools were recently discovered to have bet on their own performances, shared information with known bettors and/or manipulated games to recoup bets they – or others – had placed. This behavior resulted in a permanent loss of NCAA eligibility for each of them. Additionally, 13 student-athletes from eight schools (including some of those identified above) were found to have failed to cooperate with the sports betting integrity investigation by providing false or misleading information, failing to provide relevant documentation, and/or refusing to be interviewed by law enforcement personnel. None of them are competing today.
The Association has and will continue to aggressively pursue sports betting violations in college athletics using a multi-tiered integrity monitoring program that covers more than 22,000 competitions, but we still need other states, regulators and gaming companies to eliminate integrity threats – such as collegiate prop betting – to better protect athletes and leagues from integrity risks and predatory bettors. We will also continue to cooperate fully with law enforcement. We urge all student-athletes to make informed choices to avoid jeopardizing the game and their eligibility.
For more information on the NCAA’s sports betting efforts, click here.
