The NCAA is looking to put an end to college prop betting as we know it amid recent concerns involving sports betting.
“Sports betting issues are on the rise across the country with prop bets continuing to threaten the integrity of competition and leading to student-athletes and professional athletes getting harassed,” NCAA President Charlie Baker said in a press release Wednesday.
“The NCAA has been working with states to deal with these threats, and many are responding by banning college prop bets.
“This week, we will be contacting officials across the country in states that still allow these bets and ask them to join Ohio, Vermont, Maryland, and many others and remove college prop bets from all betting markets.”
The trend has been ongoing for a while.
Early in 2024, Ohio banned player-specific prop bets on college sports, including your typical player point totals, assists, rebounds and more.
College sports betting has always had different rule sets than professional sports, with most states disallowing betting on in-state college sports and many states not letting bets on college player prop.
This comes just a week after the NBA announced that Jontay Porter – the brother of Michael Porter Jr. and a fringe NBA player – was being investigated by the league for strange betting patterns on his prop bets.
Post-Action Betting reported Tuesday that Porter promoted gambling on a burner X account in 2022, thanking a gambling account for a winning March Madness parlay.
In theory, if Porter, whose salary in the NBA is $415,000, is able to be corrupted by gamblers, there’s no telling as to what a college player could be exposed to.
One bettor posted an unconfirmed parlay betting ticket worth $80,000 that paid out $1.2 million when Porter checked himself out of a game, winning anyone who bet on his unders a substantial amount of money.
College players do make some money thanks to NIL sponsorship deals, but the vast majority don’t make more than Porter, who is an NBA player.
This is also not the only major headline in the sports betting world, as Angels star Shohei Ohtani is also embroiled in a gambling scandal of his own, albeit in a much different way.
Get the lowdown on the Best USA Sports Betting Sites and Apps
His interpreter is accused of stealing $4.5 million from him and using it to gamble on the black market in California – where sports betting is still illegal.
In an attempt to answer these troubling questions, sports betting companies have decided to form a responsible gambling coalition among the legal sportsbooks in an attempt to thwart growing threats and concerns.
