NCAA Lobbying Lawmakers To Outlaw Individual Player Prop Bets In College Sports

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The rise of legal sports betting has been a fairly welcome development for plenty of Americans, but it’s also come with its fair share of downsides—including one issue the NCAA is gearing up to address with states that currently offer individual prop bets for student-athletes.

The NCAA was certainly no stranger to betting scandals prior to sports betting being legalized; a number of college basketball programs have been implicated in point-shaving rackets, and plenty of other players faced discipline for placing wagers even though they didn’t necessarily compromise the integrity of their games.

That issue hasn’t gone away since states began to sanction wagers following a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2018. In 2023, the NCAA said it had discovered at least 175 gambling violations in the wake of that decision, which included an investigation into football players at Iowa and Iowa State as well as the impropriety that led to Alabama’s baseball coach getting fired.

You could argue the advent of the NIL Era has made college athletes less susceptible to the allure of unsavory actors offering to pay them to tip the scales in their favor, and while that may be the case, there’s only so much sponsorship deals can do to make people immune to the temptation of greed.

That’s especially true when a number of sportsbooks across the country give bettors a chance to wager on a player’s individual performance. I can’t say I’ve personally felt the urge to bribe a college athlete in the hopes of making a profit, but if I were going to, paying them to keep their points or yardage totals as low as possible while hammering that prop bet seems like a pretty solid place to start.

Those kinds of wagers are already banned in a number of states, and based on the statement NCAA president Charlie Baker issued on Wednesday, the governing body is hoping to convince lawmakers in others to adopt similar restrictions to both protect the “integrity of competition” and cut down on instances where student-athletes have been harassed by angry bettors after a prop bet failed to hit.

I think most Americans would agree we’ve reached a point where sports betting needs to be reined in a bit (especially as the harassment issue becomes increasingly harder to ignore), and this seems like a pretty solid place to start.