NCAA will push states to ban prop bets on college athletes

The NCAA announced Wednesday it will lobby state gambling boards to ban player proposition bets in an effort to curb harassment against individual student athletes.

As March Madness tournaments get underway, the college athletics organization said prop bets — those made on the specific stat lines of players, like how many points, rebounds or turnovers they make in a game — are harmful to the sport.

“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 statement. “The NCAA has been working with states to deal with these threats, and many are responding by banning college prop bets.”

“The NCAA is drawing the line on sports betting to protect student-athletes and to protect the integrity of the game — issues across the country these last severely days shows there is more work to be done,” he said.

College prop bets are already banned in a dozen states, with Ohio and Maryland banning the practice last month. In a statement to Spectrum News after the Ohio announcement, University of Dayton Athletics Director Neil Sullivan said the move helps student safety.

“People reaching out through social media, people harassing them and their families over the internet and reaching out to them for their performance or lack of performance, you know, is not good for young people, and the stage that they're on is tough enough,” Sullivan said. “We felt that those comments and some of them were extremely vile and inappropriate, and it just crosses the line.”

Baker, a former Harvard basketball player and former governor of Massachusetts, also emphasized concerns about game integrity. While there have been no major public cases of college players manipulating their stat lines to win bets, the NBA launched an investigation into a Toronto Raptors player this week over suspicious prop betting wins.

The push would still allow bettors to put money on games’ outcomes and spread, only preventing bets that focus on specific players.