No, The Lesson Of The Iowa State Scandal Is Not Banning College Betting
We have known that something big about college betting was coming out of Iowa for a while.
Now we know at least some of what happened, which includes allegations related to Iowa State quarterback Hunter Dekkers betting on his own team and trying to disguise that he was the one betting, including while under the age of 21. (There are also allegations involving other athletes.)
We haven’t had many full-blown scandals in the first five years of expanded US sports betting, but this one ranks up there. But let’s also be clear that it could be a lot worse. There are no allegations of trying to fix outcomes out of games. He also wasn’t betting lots of money; it was thousands of dollars of small bets averaging just more than $7 a wager.
But I am already looking ahead to the potential fallout of all this. One likely outcome is increased calls to implement bans on betting on college sports altogether, or at least on in-state colleges. (Of note: you can bet on in-state schools in Iowa, but not on player props.)
We are going to see lawmakers get on soapboxes in the wake of this and tell us we need to ban college betting for the integrity of the game, to protect college students from themselves, blah blah blah, etc etc. But overreacting by banning college betting entirely would be a mistake. Why?
For starters, we really only know about this activity because of the legal and regulated market. Yes, college athletes’ access to online sportsbooks has increased in the past five years, but does anyone believe all this started when the federal ban fell in 2018? College athletes were definitely betting on offshore sites then and now, and we have no idea to what extent.
A ban on college betting in states that have legal sports wagering just sends the action on college sports (by athletes and nonathletes) back offshore or to local bookies. And we also have the problem that sports betting itself is “banned” in a bunch of other states and again, that’s not going to stop athletes from betting on sports.
You can try to predict college player performances on player vs. the house daily fantasy sports sites that operate in dozens of states outside of the regulation of sports betting. For instance, here’s a page on PrizePicks about fantasy sports entries on college player performances:
The elephant in the room is this is a widespread problem, as there is almost zero chance this is just a problem at Iowa’s two biggest colleges. I have no doubt there are similar issues happening in states and college programs all over the country. Dekkers’ attorney is probably right:
We have also had more than a handful of NFL athletes betting on NFL games, and I find it hard to believe the problem is confined to one professional sport.
The big problem that needs addressing to me is athlete education. The NCAA has long had a policy/tagline of “Don’t Bet On It,” but the efficacy of that program — and efforts by college athletic departments, pro sports leagues and pro teams — is clearly in question now.
Again, sports betting didn’t start in the United States five years ago. It’s been a part of our culture for more than a century and easily available online for decades. If you pretend that all of this is happening just because of the expansion of legal betting, you are putting your head in the sand. Yes, it might be more in athletes’ faces, but it’s just a matter of scale, not a binary choice of if it was happening or not.
Let’s also not forget that a handful of college athletic departments were doing deals with sportsbooks not long ago — dear lord, how bad does that sound in retrospect? And we also learned recently from the Wall Street Journal that the NCAA wants to make more money from gambling in the middle of all of this.
So ban college betting if you want, but you’d be ignoring the underlying problems and just treating a symptom.
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