NCAA seeks safe bet amid surge in sports gambling

The NCAA’s once-icy relationship with the sports betting industry is beginning to thaw, but the Indianapolis-based nonprofit is still holding legalized gambling at arm’s length as it evaluates the impact on college sports.

This March, an estimated $3.1 billion was wagered on the Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Tournaments, according to the American Gaming Association. Betting on college sports has generated millions in tax revenue for the 38 states that have legalized sports gambling since 2018—and billions for the platforms and sportsbooks handling the wagers.

But it has also created complications for the NCAA. The organization is policing gambling among student-athletes and advocating for stronger regulations even as it weighs how it might benefit from gambling’s popularity.

NCAA President Charlie Baker said he has some non-negotiables in the organization’s response to sports betting. Among them, he has no interest in marketing deals with gambling companies like the ones professional sports leagues and teams have with companies such as Caesars Entertainment, FanDuel and Bet365.

“I don’t see that ever happening,” Baker said in response to a question on the topic from IBJ. “It certainly won’t happen during my time here.”

But that doesn’t mean the NCAA is not making concessions to gambling where it sees fit.

In June, the internal council that oversees day-to-day governance and policy recommendations for Division I schools proposed allowing NCAA student athletes and team staff to bet on professional sports. That change will be implemented only if the Division II and Division III councils also agree to permit pro sports betting.

The proposal is a major shift from the organization’s decades-long ban on sports wagering.

Todd Shumaker, a partner specializing in sports law with Indianapolis firm Church Church Hittle + Antrim, said the conversation about allowing betting on professional sports has been ongoing for months. In most cases, he said, a proposal reaching a vote means NCAA staff and committee members have researched the matter extensively.

“This is one that’s been circling around enough,” Shumaker said.

In the early 2000s, the NCAA launched its “Don’t bet on it” campaign aimed at college athletes and adopted a slew of strict anti-sports-betting rules.

In 2023, the organization disclosed it had found 175 violations of those policies since 2018. That was the year the U.S. Supreme Court—in a case involving the NCAA—invalidated the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which had prohibited states from legalizing sports betting.

It was also in 2018, days after the Supreme Court ruling, that the NCAA lifted its ban against states with legalized sports gambling hosting championship events. At the time, that applied only to Nevada and New Jersey, which had legalized the practice before the 1992 law.

The name, image and likeness rules that rolled out in 2021 don’t directly forbid athletes from partnerships with gambling companies, but  a defacto prohibition is in place because most states’ laws on NIL largely forbid it.

David Ridpath, a sports business professor at Ohio University, said the effort to eliminate policies targeting gambling on professional sports is a step in the right direction. “There can be some regulations, but to just ban it completely” doesn’t make sense, he said.

And he said the NCAA should go further. Ridpath said while it makes sense to bar college athletes from betting on their own sport, he sees little benefit to restricting them from participating in other college-related wagers.

“I don’t see how you can stop that … or even if you should,” he said. “I think you just educate people. It’s a well-regulated industry. If odds get a little bit out of whack or there’s too much action, Vegas has a pretty good way of snuffing that out.”

NCAA officials said the organization recognizes that, despite existing rules, student athletes still place bets.

Every four years since 2004 (except in 2020, at the height of the pandemic), the NCAA has conducted a survey of student athletes about their gambling behaviors. The 2024 survey had 21,450 respondents, including nearly 7,900 within the top-tier Division I.

According to that data, about 12.6% of Division I male athletes reported they had occasionally gambled, while 2.6% of female athletes admitted the same. The figures for Division II and Division III athletes were far higher, particularly among men. In Division II, 20.2% of male athletes reported gambling; in Division III, the figure was 30.2% for male athletes.

However, those numbers are down across the board from the 2016 survey, when 16.5% of Division I men said they’d gambled occasionally.

Clint Hangebrauck, the NCAA’s managing director of enterprise risk management, said the organization’s partnership with England-based Epic Global Solutions, which specializes in gambling-harm prevention, has been helpful in reducing gambling among college athletes.

He said Epic acts as an anti-gambling outreach arm for NCAA member schools, engaging on 300 campuses with more than 100,000 athletes since the partnership started in early 2022.

“I think a lot of the great educational work is really resonating with student athletes,” Hangebrauck said, adding that they are “just a lot more aware” of gambling than were athletes of the past.

“They live in an environment where almost two-thirds of their college student peers are participating in sports betting,” he said. “So there’s a fairly negative sentiment that we hear from student athletes around just the proliferation of sports betting in America and the personal impact that it has on them.”

Shumaker, the attorney, also noted that the NCAA has shared language on its website from the National Council on Problem Gambling to try to promote healthier versions of gambling among student athletes.

Cashing in

While the NCAA has generally taken a strong anti-betting stance for its athletes, it has benefited indirectly from wagers on college sports—or found ways to improve its own position in the industry.

The NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament is among the most popular events for sports bettors, whether through official wagers or through bracket prediction contests online, in friend groups or work pools.

The tournament is also the biggest moneymaker each year for the NCAA, thanks to ticket sales and the organization’s media deal with CBS and Turner Sports, valued at about $1 billion per year.

“I’ve always thought it was really hypocritical and kind of disingenuous of the NCAA” to ban college athletes from making wagers, Ridpath said, “when they’ve done nothing to ban betting lines or try to decrease the interest nationally, because they know that it fuels revenue.”

The NCAA doesn’t get any share of revenue from bets placed on the tournament—or any of its events—but sports business and marketing experts said the organization knows that bets drive interest and viewership.

Local professional teams, along with leagues such as the NFL and NBA, are able to tout their respective sports-betting marketing partnerships. But for the NCAA, that kind of deal has so far been a bridge too far.

Like Baker, the NCAA’s Hangebrauck said those kinds of relationships carry too many risks—particularly for an entity that has consistently pushed back on legalized sports betting.

“There’s money to be left on the table, if we did have official partnerships or sponsorship deals on our championships with betting companies,” he said. “But the risk is just too high for us in the potential message that would send to that population that we’re trying to support—which is our student athletes.”

Geoff Sherman, a professor of sports management and innovation at Indiana University Indianapolis, said the NCAA’s reputation would take a hit if it signed on with a gambling partner.

“I can see them keeping that arm’s-length distance, if only because of the simple fact that for so long, their mantra was, ‘Don’t bet on it,’” he said. “It’s beyond complicated. It’s like a spider web.”

The American Gaming Association, the trade group that governs the industry, forbids marketing of sports betting products on college and university property. Several states also have outlawed sports betting advertising within certain distances of their post-secondary schools.

Ohio University’s Ridpath, however, said he could see the NCAA’s position change if it felt strapped for cash. He noted that the organization’s previous presidents said players would never be paid—a position the NCAA was forced to abandon due to multiple lawsuits. Starting this fall, college athletes can receive direct payments.

Gambling is “a massive revenue source, and if the NCAA needs a [gambling] partner to have a massive revenue source, they’ll absolutely do it—I’m convinced of that 100%,” Ridpath said. “Maybe it won’t happen under Baker, but I think it will happen. It will happen one day, and I think it’d be kind of silly for them not to embrace that. Every other sport really has.”

Ridpath said Baker should acknowledge that the NCAA is now essentially running a professional sports operation that is attached to college campuses. “And there should be nothing wrong with them having a [gambling] partner,” he added.

Propped up

The NCAA actually has already cracked open the door.

In 2018, the organization signed a partnership with data firm Genius to distribute competition data from NCAA championship events to operators that can use the information to authenticate betting results and provide correct competition information for partners and their customers. The deal doesn’t permit companies to claim to be official partners of the NCAA or to use the relationship for other promotional purposes, but it does allow for the use of the NCAA logo to indicate that contest data has been verified.

And the partnership with Genius has one other caveat for companies looking to benefit from the NCAA’s data: Their platforms can’t allow prop bets on college games.

Those wagers, also known as side bets, are tied to individual performances and actions—like the number of points or rebounds players tally—rather than the outcome of the contest. It’s something the NCAA has fought to banish from legalized gambling.

Currently, 13 states, including Illinois and Ohio, do not allow any kind of player prop betting on college sports, while 10 others and Washington, D.C., allow them only for teams outside their respective territory. Eight others, including Kentucky and Michigan, allow no-holds-barred prop betting.

Indiana falls into a category of its own. The state law allows prop bets on college athletes before a contest begins but forbids wagers during the game.

Baker said the NCAA sees no value in betting companies offering prop bets at the college level, and there’s a heavy push for uniformity on that front.

“I’ve talked to too many young people playing sports who’ve been harassed too many times—online and in person—by people who bet the under or the over on their individual performance and are pissed about the fact that they didn’t win,” he said.

Prop bets send “all the wrong messages to young people and creates an enormous amount of tension for them, often with their classmates and their schoolmates” who might be placing those bets, he said.

Joe Maloney, the American Gaming Association’s senior vice president of strategic communications told IBJ that “there’s not a blanket policy for or against” prop bets on college athletes within the trade group. But Maloney said the association “keeps an open dialogue” with states considering any changes to its gambling laws.

According to the NCAA’s 2024 gambling survey, 23% of Division I men’s basketball players said someone on campus had approached them after a game about how its outcome affected them in a bet, while 17% said they’d received negative or threatening messages from someone related to one of their contests.

And data in March shows that while online harassment was up significantly year over year for the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, athletes reported a decrease in direct interactions with agitators who had placed bets—a 66% drop for women and a 36% decline for men.

Hangebrauck, the NCAA’s head of risk management, said the NCAA has had some success in lobbying states to stop allowing prop betting—Ohio adopted regulations outlawing college sports prop bets last year—but the overall results have been “a mixed bag.”

He said while in some cases the pushback has come from states uncertain about what entity would have the authority to enforce a change, other states have indicated that they’re not inclined to squelch any tax revenue they generate from the practice. Still others, he said, have challenged the NCAA’s argument that prop bets harm student athletes.

While the NCAA is continuing to procure data to take back to those lawmakers, Hangebrauck said, little more can be done except to discourage bettors from participating in prop bet games.

“For these states, there’s sort of a common-sense leap that they have to take as they consider this, and they’re just not willing to, [without] really specific evidence that we have related to their state,” Hangebrauck said.•

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The Indiana Lawyer reporter Daniel Carson contributed to this story.