We have been on a collision course.
A collision is happening.
On Thursday, Alabama fired head baseball coach Brad Bohannon as reports emerged that, the Friday prior, he’d been on the phone with a bettor in Ohio when the decision was made to scratch Alabama’s best starting pitcher with a back injury for that evening’s game against LSU. The bettor in question bet heavily on LSU before the news of the scratch was public. This was, more or less, insider trading.
Yesterday, after holding a few baseball players out of a weekend series against Ohio State for unspecified reasons, Iowa announced that 26 of its athletes and one full-time athletic department employee are under investigation for violating NCAA sports betting rules. Later, Iowa State announced that 15 of its athletes are under similar investigation. The Iowa Gaming Commission is heavily involved. It’s unclear what the violations were, but at the moment they appear to be mere rules breakings, dumb and unnecessary but not as bad as the pseudo-insider trading or, worse, point-shaving or match-fixing.
When authority over the legality of sports gambling returned to the states, and when states began allowing us to place bets from the comfort of our phones, an obvious problem appeared in front of college athletics: College kids were going to bet on sports. With 200,000 Division I athletes among those college kids, athletes were going to be surrounded by legal, regulated, above-the-table sports gambling and all its illegal, hard to regulate, under-the-table temptations. The existence of sports gambling wasn’t new, but for every Division I athletic program outside of UNLV and the University of Nevada, proximity and prevalence would (and did) skyrocket. Professional sports, being so much smaller and involving contracts and collective bargaining agreements, would be easier to police. College sports? Ripe for scandals, especially at schools most earnestly pursuing the idea of student-athletics, mixing athletes with non-athlete students, the college kids who can legally bet on sports. It was (and is) a matter of time before 19-year-olds hatched a half-brained point-shaving scheme in the back of sociology class. In the immediate term, the information market would be (and is) awash with who’d been seen wearing what sort of walking boot on campus.
This week, the scandal is unfolding, and the hope is that it’s a cautionary tale, enough of a splash to help schools reinforce to athletes that they cannot, under any circumstances, bet on virtually any sport (NCAA rules say that athletes can’t bet on any version of any sport in which the NCAA conducts a championship, banning everything from fantasy football to Olympic beach volleyball betting), and that they must be extremely careful with what information they share with whom. The concern is that it’s the beginning of the surfacing of an unmitigable problem, a fatal flaw with college sports betting in which college sports cannot be kept safe from the influence of gambling.
There are, I’d offer, four categories of sports gambling problems, especially as they pertain to college athletics.
The first are external to sports. They’re negative public outcomes, most notably the effects of addiction: Athletes are subjected to verbal and online threats and abuse from people who, much like those who can’t handle their alcohol, can’t handle gambling. Gamblers—not athletes themselves—are at risk of addiction and all its ill effects. More innocuously, sports gambling ads during live sporting events can get annoying.
The second are those which attack the integrity of sports, namely point-shaving and match-fixing scandals. For those unfamiliar with these terms, point-shaving is when a player or players make an effort to keep their team from covering the spread, still winning a winnable game but trying to not win it by as much as the betting markets expect. One way this could work: A gambler could bet on a hypothetical basketball team, let’s call it Iowa A&M, to not cover the spread as an 11-point favorite. Players on Iowa A&M could then be enlisted to make sure the team didn’t cover the spread, missing shots and turning the ball over and committing fouls to keep the margin of victory at 10 points or fewer. Match-fixing is worse, but it’s the same concept made more straightforward: Someone, a referee or an athlete or a coach, makes money by throwing a game, with involved bettors betting on the certain team to lose.
The third are those which attack the integrity of sports betting markets, namely the sharing of private information. Like insider trading, these involve someone—such as a bettor in Ohio who talks on the phone with Alabama’s baseball coach—using something they know and most of the market does not know to their own advantage.
The fourth are benign in a vacuum, but they’re important overall. These are the violations of guardrail rules. This is the bucket into which we’re guessing the Iowa and Iowa State violations fall. The NCAA established strict guardrails in an effort to keep gambling distant enough to not open the doors for the second and third categories of problems to get close. Those guardrails have been violated, and there is no harm, but keeping the guardrail firm ideally keeps sports safe from point-shaving, match-fixing, and the rest.
Personally, I’m mostly unconcerned about the first, third, and fourth buckets.
With the fourth bucket—guardrail rules violations—I think the NCAA should strictly enforce its guardrails, but I don’t think even massively frequent guardrail rules violations are a problem in and of themselves. The guardrails are a good buffer, and I hope they aren’t violated, but when they are, no one is actually hurt.
With the first bucket—addictive behavior, including belligerency towards athletes—I fail to see the difference between sports gambling and alcohol, or even sports gambling and caffeine. People need to handle their drugs. People need to handle their gambling. Most of us do, at least to the extent that we aren’t actively harming others. Sports gambling teetotalers (or opportunistic journalists playing the role) have their points, but if they’re going to go after legal sports betting, I’d like to see them push for illegalizing coffee as well. Coffee’s expensive, it’s recently played a role in genocide, and certain people are out-and-out assholes when they aren’t getting their fix. I’ve spent far more money on coffee this year than I’ve lost betting on sports, and I’m not sure coffee’s made me happier.
With the third bucket—information sharing, sports betting’s equivalent to insider trading—I’m completely unconcerned. I understand why others are, and I’m not going to die on this hill, but this is hugely different from insider trading in financial markets, and even in financial markets, I’m not sure insider trading is as bad as Martha Stewart’s prosecutors made it out to be. In financial market insider trading, everyone is a winner or loser when insider trading occurs, but those playing the game have taken on that risk. In sports betting, there aren’t necessarily any losers among the betting public. Bettors themselves aren’t hurt by the act if they’re being smart: If a line moves quickly and you don’t know why, the rule is to stay away. The only stakeholders hurt are the sportsbooks themselves, and the way sportsbooks make their money is by finding the right line and setting a high-enough price, both of which are sportsbooks’ jobs (jobs they traditionally do very well, which is why sportsbooks make more than enough money to continue to exist).
The second bucket is the big problem, and to shed our naivete: It’s probably happening. Point-shaving and match-fixing are probably happening. They’re definitely happening globally, and they might be happening in college sports, and the reality is we have no idea how much they’re happening in college sports if they’re happening there at all. The question we will likely eventually argue over, as a society, is then this: Does local legality of sports gambling increase the prevalence of point-shaving and match-fixing enough to outweigh the benefits they bring? Is the difference between their prevalence in an above-the-table world and their prevalence in an under-the-table world big enough to outweigh the good the legality brings? It’s a question with only opinion-based answers, and it depends how everyone weighs the intrinsic benefit of the integrity of sports against the broad economic benefits of economic activity, the broad societal benefits of tax revenue, and the narrow industry benefits of how much gambling increases attention paid to sports (the more people bet, the more people watch, the more revenue sports bring in, the more expenses colleges can expend on sports).
I can’t answer this question for you. I’ll offer my answers when the specifics start to arise, but you’ll have to answer it yourself. What I can do—or at least what I’m trying to do—is define the conversation. Because if this is the gambling crisis college sports have been awaiting, it’s going to be a media mess.
A big thing to remember is that every sports media outlet has an interest in sports gambling. Many—possibly even the majority—have explicit financial relationships with sportsbooks, through advertising or ownership. Even those of us which don’t have explicit relationships do have implicit financial relationships with the industry. There’s a reason I publish bets every day: It draws clicks. Everyone from The Barking Crow to the New York Times (who owns The Athletic) has an interest in sports gambling being widespread, because a lot of us publish betting-centric content, and those of us who don’t still benefit the same way the sports themselves do as industries: Sports gambling makes sports more popular; sports’ risen popularity draws more consumers to our content.
Another big thing to remember is that not every media outlet has an interest in sports gambling, and an argument could even be made that political media has an interest in teetotaling on this front, or at the very least stoking the fire of the argument. Arguments are good for political media. Perceptions of crisis are good for political media. Sports’ popularity—given political tribalism plays off similar emotions, meaning sports compete with politics for people’s love and loathing—is bad for political media.
A third? Politicians have varying incentives regarding sports gambling, but politicians will do a lot of things to get attention. Everybody loves a crisis.
In other words, if this turns out to be the storm we’ve long feared, please keep a level head. Remember that everyone has an interest; remember the four categories of problems. Hopefully, the Alabama and Iowa/Iowa State scandals are isolated and inconsequential while being newsworthy enough to get schools to get athletes and employees to take the guardrail rules seriously. Hopefully, healthy enforcement by state gaming commissions keeps the industry running smoothly. Eventually, though, there’s likely to be a trainwreck. When that happens, you’re allowed to stay on the rails.
Iowa State Got Cody Chittum
Sticking with the Cyclone State for a moment: We got Cody Chittum. The potential 157-pounder and former top-ranked recruit in his class (I think he’s still ranked highly, I just can’t confirm because I don’t pay for a FloWrestling subscription and it appears he was at one point part of the Class of 2022) is coming to Ames.
Chittum’s flipped from Minnesota to Iowa, and now from Iowa to Iowa State, and kind of like when someone marries their mistress, it’s hard to trust Chittum to actually stick as a Cyclone. Still, we have him right now, and we might even get him signing a letter of intent later today, if it hasn’t been signed already.
(Other Cyclone news since we last talked Cyclones: Jeremiah Williams entered the transfer portal, so the men’s basketball team has an extra scholarship available; The women’s tennis team will host UCLA on Friday at Ames High School in the Sweet Sixteen, which is a hilarious location but still exciting and cool.)
You Can’t Win the Draft Lottery
The Cubs (more on them below) posted a big message on the video board last night offering “congratulations” to the Blackhawks on winning the NHL Draft Lottery, securing the rights to draft Connor Bedard and reinvigorating a despondent fanbase.
I’m happy the Blackhawks are getting Bedard. I have Blackhawks sympathies, I think it’s good for the NHL when the Blackhawks are good. But “Congratulations”? Seriously?
A good sign of a broken sport is when fans are excited by their team doing worse. When teams are congratulated after losing enough to get the top pick in a draft, the shark has been jumped. The Big Four leagues need to decouple draft order from record, and they need to do it now. Let the best teams win. Stop incentivizing failure.
Other NHL and NBA thoughts, series by series:
- The Knights upended the Stanley Cup picture last night, not only beating the Oilers but absolutely shutting them down. Adin Hill is suddenly a main character, and we could be seeing the two most recent expansion teams show down in the Western Conference Finals.
- The Panthers won’t play until tomorrow, but they benefit in the narrative game from that Knights upset in Game 3 in Edmonton. They’re the new Stanley Cup favorites. In betting markets and in Gelo alike, we agree that the Panthers are likelier than any other team to win this Stanley Cup. This is surprising, and it is also unsurprising. They were great last year. They did things to get better. They had a shitty regular season, and there’s more to it than this, but the NHL forgives some shitty regular seasons through its format, and through what seems to be the streaky nature of hockey as a sport.
- The Stars aren’t very good. They’re probably better than the Kraken, they’ll probably win tonight and retake home-ice advantage in that series, but the Stars are not very good. Knowing hockey, they will now win the Stanley Cup, but really, the Oilers or Knights are going to be comparably big favorites no matter who they play next round.
- The Devils have to be feeling great heading into tonight. They apparently fixed their goal-scoring issues on Sunday, they’ve handled this series script before (and recently), they don’t have home ice and they won’t have home ice unless they take a 3–2 lead, but they’re in a solid place from which to compete. You can’t ask for much more than that.
- I don’t know how good James Harden is. Of every main character in the NBA Playoffs, he might be the biggest enigma. He could score fifty tonight and lead the Sixers to the brink of the Eastern Conference Finals or take the lion’s share of the blame for an ugly loss and neither would be surprising. The man is a mystery.
- I would assume the Nuggets take down the Suns tonight and get back on top, but there’s also a feeling with the Suns which says that if they’re given enough time, they’ll be the best team. Chris Paul’s absence does hurt, but Kevin Durant and Devin Booker are the best 1-2 punch in the league, and this especially matters in the playoffs.
- Scott Foster refereeing last night’s Game 4 between the Warriors and Lakers was most fascinating because the Lakers ultimately won. I’m not going to say that Foster is being actively tasked with rigging series, because I don’t think that’s what happens, but I do think it’s worth asking this: Is a Warriors 3–1 deficit better for narrative arc than the series being tied 2–2? In either situation, I’d imagine the Warriors were going to be favored in Game 5, so in this real world where the Warriors now need to win at least one on the road to survive, we’re on track for a higher-stakes Game 6 than we’d be looking at were we expecting the Lakers to be trying to survive at home. The chances the series goes seven games are lower, but if all goes according to expectation, Game 6 should now be a doozy.
- I’m not sure the Heat aren’t going to win the Eastern Conference, because I’m not sure the Celtics are going to beat the Sixers, and the Sixers appear much more beatable for the Heat than Boston does, even if the Sixers are probably better than the consensus seems to have agreed they are.
The Cubs Are Below .500
A lot of things happened last night at Wrigley Field, between Willson Contreras’s return and Nico Hoerner hurting his hamstring and Christopher Morel rejoining the big league club. The biggest thing, though, is that the Cubs lost, dropping them back under .500 again after briefly escaping this weekend. The Cubs, who started the season 11–6 and 14–10, have now dropped eight of their last eleven and twelve of their last 18.
I’ve been on the pessimistic side within the Cubs blogosphere, but I’ve also been right. This team is not playoff caliber. They briefly made making the playoffs a real possibility, and it’s still on the table thanks to how many other teams are underperforming in the National League, but this roster just isn’t that good. The problem—and this is why I’ve tried to be loud in my pessimism—is that the Cubs are in a place where the rebuild is going to be evaluated, by many, based on how the Cubs perform relative to expectations, and since I personally think the rebuild is going excellently, I want those expectations to be low. Winning 79 games this year—FanGraphs’s current projection—would be a rousing success, and would likely be accompanied by a lot of the bricks in the eventual house finding their footing. There are so many more bricks on the way up. The front office is building something great. It just takes time.
