Obscure backwaters of college basketball could be the most fertile ground for the sport’s darkest activities: illegal betting.
The sweeping federal indictment unsealed Thursday exposed what’s alleged to be a massive college hoops betting scandal and shined a harsh light on some of basketball’s little-known players and locales.
As college sports becomes an even bigger business, with haves and have-nots, it makes sense that lesser-known players toiling at smaller academic institutions might want to cash in, says Dan Lebowitz, executive director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University.
“What about all the kids that aren’t making bank?” Lebowitz told NBC News on Friday.
“That’s when somebody convinces them that this is a good way to do it — and we’re talking about young players with frontal lobes that aren’t even fully developed yet,” Lebowitz said. “So you get the mix of guys that are outside the NIL mainstream, guys that aren’t getting those endorsement packages, guys that aren’t getting paid $2 million, and they’ve always grown up being the best athlete in their high school, in their town, in their city.”
"NIL," shorthand for the NCAA’s name, image and likeness policy that allows student-athletes to make money from their personal brand, has radically changed the face of college sports. It allows athletes to be compensated for the millions of dollars they generate for their university athletic departments — but it has also been a destabilizing force with student-athletes chasing the best deals possible.
The age of NIL has coincided with sudden rise of sports gambling, once a verboten in pro and intercollegiate athletics, but now a seemingly omnipotent force in the business.
Far from prying eyes
Fixers allegedly targeted games across an array of smaller universities, namely Nicholls State, Tulane, Northwestern State, St. Louis, La Salle, Fordham, Buffalo, DePaul, Robert Morris, Southern Mississippi, North Carolina A&T, Kennesaw State, Coppin State, New Orleans, Abilene Christian, Eastern Michigan and Alabama State, according to the indictment.
These schools are a far cry from the storied institutions that play in college basketball shrines like Cameron Indoor Stadium or Pauley Pavilion, or capture the nation’s attention during the annual March Madness tournaments.
Of the 29 games allegedly targeted by gamblers, attendance at these contests rarely topped 3,000. The comfort of anonymity likely made gamblers more comfortable pulling strings believing they were safe from notice, Lebowitz said.
“If you’re betting on a game being played in some YMCA in Arkansas, you’re probably thinking no one’s getting that [on TV] right?” said Lebowitz. “You’re thinking this is off the beaten track, or at least out from under the microscope.”
But in reality, playing in that kind of backwater only exposes gamblers to more risk.
Molly Harry, who teaches sports management at the University of Florida, said she was floored reading about $247,000 allegedly bet by fixers on a La Salle-St. Bonaventure game on Feb. 21, 2024.
“That’s a little ridiculous, right? That’s obviously going to cause some flags,” Harry said.
She likened it to Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon, who was fired in 2023 over bets made in a relatively obscure contest.
“[Bohannon] thought he could get away with it because there’s not much focus on baseball betting. It’s actually just kind of the opposite,” she said.
NCAA President Charlie Baker on Thursday insisted his organization is aggressively leading the fight against unsavory betting activities, boasting that it “has the largest integrity monitoring program in the world.”
But Harry still holds the NCAA responsible for allowing cozy relationships between gambling interests and member institutions to fester, saying the “sports gambling wave took on tsunami-like effects.”
In 2020, the University of Colorado became one of the first major academic institutions to announce that its athletic program has entered into a corporate sponsorship agreement with an online sportsbook.
That was just the beginning. Just last year, the NCAA authorized licensed sportsbooks to use its marks and logos and receive official data from championship events. But with those lines no longer just blurred but erased completely, alleged point shaving at various institutions has caught the attention of lawmakers.
“It snowballed and the NCAA said, ‘Oh, snap, now we have to do something about it,’ and they just weren’t thinking about it enough, weren’t prepared enough, unfortunately,” Harry said. “And now there just really aren’t any guardrails on how to manage that.”
Federal authorities announcing the indictments on Thursday acknowledged the lure student-athletes might feel in the big-money setting of modern college sports.
No guardrails
In announcing the indictments on Thursday, prosecutors say the alleged conspiracy began in September 2022 when the defendants started to bribe players in the Chinese Basketball Association to engage in “point shaving,” when someone is paid to manipulate a game’s final margin of victory and not necessarily the win-loss outcome.
High-stakes sports gamblers Marves Fairley, 40, and Shane Hennen, 40, were among the 26 men indicted. Prosecutors said Fairley and Hennen initially targeted Antonio Blakeney, who at the time was playing for the CBA’s Jiangsu Dragons.
In a March 6, 2023, game, Blakeney's Dragons were 11.5-point underdogs to the Guangdong Southern Tigers. Fairley and Hennen bet $198,3000 via BetRivers Sportsbook on the favorites to cover that spread, authorities said.
Blakeney, who averaged 32 points per game that season, scored just 11 in that contest, leading to a 127-96 spread-covering win for the Tigers.
“The short-term gain will never be worth the long-term loss,” said Wayne Jacobs, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia field office.
“The consequences are real: federal criminal charges, permanent damage to careers and lasting harm to reputations. These are the shots that no athletes should make,” Jacobs added.
Still, urging players not to cash in via gamblers could fall flat, according to Declan Hill, who teaches government and public service at the University of New Haven.
“Most of these athletes involved in the NCAA are never going to make another dollar in their life [playing sports]. They only have three or four years of potential income,” said Hill, an authority on match fixing and sports corruption.
“People are making lots of cash off these players, but it ain’t the players, and they’ve only got X number of years of eligibility. So, you know, for some of them, it’s like, ‘Hey, we got to make money while the sun shines.’”
