Betting popular in NCAA sports
Study shows money influences college athletes

By Teddy Greenstein
Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO (KRT)—When stories broke in February about the lurid side of college football recruiting—tales of campus visits that included strip clubs, alcohol, private planes and lobster dinners—the NCAA’s response was to form a task force to initiate reform.

“In the past, the NCAA has often waited until a problem boiled over and then reacted,” NCAA President Myles Brand said.

That apparently will not be the case with another potential campus epidemic—student-athletes betting on sports.

Brand joined several colleagues in Chicago on May 12 to discuss the findings of an NCAA-commissioned study that found significant levels of gambling among college athletes.

Brand also announced the formation of a 26-member task force that outgoing Notre Dame President Rev. Edward A. Malloy will head to examine the problem and offer solutions.

“We’re trying to get ahead of the curve and make a difference,” Malloy said. “This isn’t responding to [scandals] at Kentucky, [City College of New York], Boston College, Northwestern.”

Brand repeatedly said sports gambling threatens both the welfare of student-athletes and the integrity of the game.

While nearly 35 percent of male student-athletes surveyed said they had engaged in some type of sports betting over the past year, the more alarming numbers were these: 1.1 percent of football players said they had “taken money for playing poorly in a game,” and 2.3 percent admitted they had been asked to affect the outcome of a game because of gambling debts.

In all, more than 49,000 student-athletes (out of 360,000) said they bet on college sports last year. The forms included NCAA basketball pools, parlay cards and wagers through a bookie or with a friend.
“With percentages like these, there is no college or university in the NCAA that can safely claim it does not have a gambling problem on campus,” Brand said.

And though the survey was anonymous, officials warned that these might be low-end figures.

“If the game is affected negatively by gambling,” Malloy said, “the sport loses integrity, and then everything becomes professional wrestling with a predetermined outcome.”

Current NCAA rules prohibit student-athletes, coaches and athletic department employees from betting on a college or professional sporting event, legally or illegally. (Wagering on sports such as boxing, auto racing or horse racing is not against the rules.) They also cannot share information with gamblers.

Fewer than 60 percent of Division I athletes—and fewer than 40 percent of Division III athletes—said they knew the NCAA’s rules about sports wagering, which call for penalties that could include a loss of scholarship.

“That’s alarming when you recognize that nearly 50 percent of the student-athletes don’t really know or understand the rules,” said Grant Teaff, vice-chair of the NCAA task force and the executive director of the American Football Coaches Association. “To throw away your opportunity for an education is one of the most disastrous things that can happen to a student-athlete.”

The survey also found that sports gambling on the Internet was less commonplace than expected, with just 5.3 percent of Division I male athletes partaking.

It found that NCAA golfers (30.3 percent) and lacrosse players (29.3) were most likely to bet.

It also found that football was twice as susceptible to point-shaving attempts as basketball and that male athletes were four times more likely than female athletes to bet.

“I should say parenthetically that personally, as a religious figure, I don’t think gambling is morally abhorrent in and of itself,” Malloy said. “The question is not whether gambling is acceptable—that’s a policy question for the nation—but rather the degree of harm that some people can experience.”

Specifically, when a student-athlete goes into debt for sports betting and is then at the mercy of a bookmaker.

“We’re not trying to change the world,” Brand said. “Many people have problems with gambling for all kinds of reasons. Our issue is the welfare of students There will always be gambling, but we want to control the situation better.”