Beyond March Madness, colleges face sports betting issue

A crime ring travels around the nation, inviting athletes to parties where there’s gambling. The plan is to put the student-athletes in debt and compromise them for future exploitation.

The plot sounds like a Hollywood script. But at least one college official believes it’s happening in real life, part of a season pockmarked by suspicious bets on several low-profile schools across the country that suggest compromised competition.

“What we found out is they’re going into towns, throwing parties and having events, getting guys to come,” said Chris Grant, the commissioner of the Southland Conference. “And when they come to these parties, they get [players] to gamble on site and [then say], ‘OK, well you owe me X amount of dollars on the back end.'”

Grant, like most smaller-conference commissioners, has been on alert for sports wagering issues that have broken out all season far from the glitz and spotlight of power teams such as those in this weekend’s Final Four in San Antonio.

One Southland Conference member, the University of New Orleans, is among a number of schools whose games have been flagged for suspicious betting in connection to a gambling ring. That ring, which is under federal investigation for its alleged role in an NBA betting scandal involving Jontay Porter, placed bets on at least two New Orleans men’s basketball games this season, ESPN previously reported. Four New Orleans players were suspended after a late-January game, reportedly because of an investigation into sports gambling. The Privateers finished the season 4-27.

“For us, it seems to point back to an organized crime ring that’s not just localized in the Southland footprint,” Grant said. “It is going on around the country.”

Bookmakers first began noticing anomalies during the 2023-24 college basketball season and pointed to a UAB-Temple game in March 2024 that raised significant concern. The other incidents allegedly occurred in the low level of Division I, often featuring losing teams. Mississippi Valley State. Eastern Michigan. North Carolina A&T. Investigations are ongoing, and public details are scant about who’s behind the suspicious betting and why certain games and programs were targeted.

There has not been a point-shaving scheme in college basketball that has resulted in a conviction since legalized sports betting began spreading around the U.S. in 2018. The NCAA and its member institutions are concerned that the streak is in jeopardy.

“It’s just really fragile,” said Mark Hicks, the NCAA’s managing director of enforcement who spearheads the association’s anti-gambling education efforts. “We want to believe that these games are unpredictable, that people don’t have ulterior motives, that they’re playing to win. [But] it’s a fragile system.”

Gambling industry sources say the suspicious bets in several games were on the point spreads and over/unders on first halves. These bets on games involving small-conference teams might seem like a small-time opportunity to the casual gambler or observer. Betting limits on such games are typically a few thousand dollars at sportsbooks, after all.

Gambling syndicates, however, aim to circumvent the limits by working as a team and sharing information and sportsbook accounts, according to sportsbook sources in the U.S. and offshore. One of the men charged in connection with the Porter case had a “network of co-conspirators across the country” and “orchestrated and participated in numerous fraudulent wager schemes” that “resulted in potentially millions of dollars’ worth of illicit profits,” according to a court document filed by federal prosecutors.

The sportsbook sources said bettors with inside information tend to wager in a coordinated fashion rather than place large individual bets that can trigger compliance checks. That’s what occurred with some of the betting against teams under investigation: A surge of action began showing up and didn’t stop, despite the lines moving against them, a major red flag, the sources said.

While the NCAA braces for what comes next, it remains concerned about individual prop bets, which can be easily influenced. Over/under bets on stats such as points or rebounds can be tempting, and seemingly innocent, ways for players “to place bets on themselves,” Hicks said.

All of this makes arguably the most difficult job in college athletics even more difficult. Just how do you get the message out to over 500,000 student-athletes, very few of whom are great players on great teams, that they are just as appealing to scheming gamblers as a future NBA lottery pick? How do you get them to realize that money can be made on mostly anonymous players in mostly ignored games via mostly obscure bets?

“I mean, it’s just unnerving as an athletic director to try and get your fingers around it,” said High Point AD Dan Hauser. “And really the way you can get a handle on it is just to overeducate and overcommunicate.”

The NCAA, conferences and on-campus compliance offices attempt to work in lockstep to provide information to athletes. There are guest speakers, in-person sessions, online programs and so on and so on.

“In terms of educating athletes, we [constantly repeat that] you don’t have to be the star player in order to be at risk. That is something that is a key message point in every delivery session on campus,” Hicks said.

“That’s why they go to Divisions I, II and III and speak to all high-profile athletes and also nonrevenue-generating sports to drive home that message,” Hicks continued. “You know it can affect everyone in every sport regardless your competition level.”

The Southland Conference has hired IC360, an integrity compliance firm used by leagues at the high-revenue levels of college athletics. “From a president and commissioner standpoint, I want that preventive care on what to look out for before getting in compromising situations, ending your eligibility, ending the season for a team and mistakenly doing it,” Grant said.

Among those doing the communicating is Stevin “Hedake” Smith, who during the 1993-94 season was caught up in a high-profile point-shaving scandal when he played at Arizona State.

The now 53-year-old works as an ambassador for Epic Global Solutions, a firm that partners with the NCAA and is focused on educating athletes about gambling harm. He doesn’t mince words when it comes to his current mission — stop someone from becoming the next player to fall into trouble, especially in this era when sports wagering is on every phone and advertisements are on every media site.

“You’re not going to stop gambling, can’t stop it,” Smith told ESPN. “But we can educate them of the consequences.”

Smith remains concerned that young athletes don’t understand the lengths that bad actors will go to to compromise them. Smith said coming out of high school in Dallas, gambling to him was shooting dice and playing cards. He was introduced to sports betting at Arizona State through campus bookmaker Benny Silman and agreed to participate in a point-shaving scheme in exchange for payment. In 1997, Smith pleaded guilty to conspiracy for what the feds alleged was point-shaving in four Sun Devils games during the 1993-94 season. He spent one year in prison.

As he tours the country, speaking with current athletes, he senses the same naivete about gambling that he once had.

“There’s a lot of them who are not educated on gambling, so they’ll be nonchalant about some information that gamblers can use, want,” Smith said. “This is some serious business. There are people out there that this is what they get paid to do, to look for situations like this.”

It may all sound like something out of Hollywood, which is a long way from some little campus in some small-time league.

That’s the problem, the NCAA says. And that’s the ongoing challenge.