Wetzel: NCAA deal with sportsbooks looks crass but is sneaky smart

They work with athletes. They work with coaches. They work with law enforcement, sports wagering integrity watchdogs and even the casinos themselves — from Vegas to your iPhone. They lobby politicians, run public awareness campaigns and then try to do it all again.

Criticize the NCAA members for any number of issues. But there should be no doubt that they want to prevent their games from being compromised, their players from being corrupted and their athletes from being harassed and threatened by unsuccessful gamblers.

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Yet with hundreds of teams and hundreds of thousands of athletes, it can feel impossible.

“It’s absolutely a challenge,” said Mark Hicks, the NCAA’s managing director of enforcement who spearheads the association’s anti-gambling and anti-gambling education efforts.

The most recent men’s basketball season, for example, included a handful of suspicious suspensions. These did not involve March Madness or SEC football, but obscure bets (say, first-half totals) on losing, low-major hoops teams.

How do you try to stop that?

Well, last week the NCAA got creative with a move that might appear to be naked hypocrisy but is actually a bit of savvy from an organization rarely known for it.

As ESPN’s David Purdum reported, the NCAA has struck a deal with the technology firm Genius Sports to authorize licensed sportsbooks to receive official data from championship events, including the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments. The books will also be able to use the NCAA logo and branding on its apps.

What appears to be the latest “Do-as-I-say, not-what-I-profit-from” sports wagering deal comes with an important NCAA catch.

To be able to use the valuable real-time data — considered the best available for accurate, in-game wagering — sportsbooks must make a number of concessions. Most notable is the banning of individual prop bets, particularly bets on underperformance, that the NCAA considers the most easily manipulated and thus make student-athletes enticing targets.

It is far easier, say, for a single athlete to score fewer points than expected than for an entire team’s performance to be rigged. The player can miss a few shots or take themselves out of the game due to “injury” or “illness.” This is how the case involving NBA player Jontay Porter played out.

As such, sophisticated criminal gambling rings are incentivized to get to that one player. The NCAA says this is particularly the case at smaller schools in the middle of losing seasons where players display a lack of awareness of their vulnerability, not to mention lack of NIL money in their Venmo accounts.

Athletes can also easily place bets on themselves, or have a friend do it, in ways that seem more innocent than being targeted by some mobster but is still the same crime.

“There is this belief that sports match manipulation is an organized crime deal and there’s no denying that,” Hicks said. “But at the same time we’ve entered into a space where with ease [athletes] can place bets on themselves or give information to the sophomore across the hall that, ‘Hey I’m not feeling great today.'”

Additionally, prop bets focused on individual performance open up athletes to threats and online bullying from gamblers. The NCAA has sought laws against that as well.

By giving sportsbooks that won’t accept those kinds of bets a potential advantage over sportsbooks that still do, there is now a competitive business advantage to stop accepting such wagers. In theory, it should lead to a decrease in the most problematic bets.

“NCAA data will only be available to sportsbooks if they remove risky bets from their platforms and agree to fully cooperate with NCAA investigations and provide key information, including geolocation data and device records,” said Tim Buckley, the NCAA’s senior vice president for external affairs.

It’s not clear how many sportsbooks, including ESPN BET, will sign on. The NCAA says revenue from any deal will be used to fund further sports wagering educational efforts.

In no way does this solve the problem. Nor is it likely to end, or perhaps even make a significant cut, in sports wagering in general. And yes, those desperately seeking prop bets will still find outlets, legal or not.

In the grand scheme of things, this may be just a sandcastle against a rising tide, but it is still something. This should produce a tangible, even if slight-to-moderate, impact.

“It’s just so easy and with all the different offerings and betting on the statistical performance of individuals … it’s just really fragile,” Hicks said. “We want to believe that these games are unpredictable, that they’re being played by people who don’t have ulterior motives. That they’re playing to win. But it’s a fragile system.”

The NCAA has always known this and always opposed the legalization of sports wagering, even as it would improve television ratings. Once that dam broke though, it has lobbied state and federal lawmakers to ban prop bets on individual players (Louisiana, Maryland, Ohio and Vermont currently do).

For decades the NCAA wielded considerable power — through often draconian rule enforcement and an influential bully pulpit directed at a public that trusted it. Those days are mostly gone.

The challenges, though, are greater than ever in many ways.

Tuesday wasn’t a cure-all. It was, however, a smart use of what leverage the NCAA still has.