NCAA chief thinks colleges should get into the sports betting business. Bad idea

Something jaw-dropping happened on June 8 at the University of Arizona’s “DC Center” in the nation’s capital.

The moment attracted a few stories in sports media, but it probably should have launched a national conversation.

It didn’t.

Speaking to the UA-sponsored Future of College Athletics, NCAA president Charlie Baker said, “We have a major opportunity to get into the sports betting space.”

That’s a striking comment coming from the head of the “organization dedicated to the well-being and lifelong success of college athletes,” as the NCAA self-describes.

Striking because in the five years since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the ban on sports betting in most states, sports wagering has exploded into a multibillion legal enterprise.

Gambling comes with its own costs

Today, 34 states and the District of Columbia have legalized sports betting.

And since the Supreme Court ruled in 2018, Americans have bet more than $220 billion in legal wagers on sports, The New York Times reports.

Arizonans have bet about $9 billion of that money, The Arizona Republic’s Corina Vanek reports.

Baker’s comments stand out because the explosion of wealth that sports betting generates does not come without social costs.

The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates the cost of problem gambling in America is $7 billion, which includes crime (for instance, people stealing or selling drugs to pay off gambling debts), health-care spending and job loss.

College students are especially at risk

The fallout has been toxic for one cohort in particular — college-age young people.

Young Americans aged 18 to 24 are especially at risk for gambling addiction, Dr. Timothy Fong, co-director of UCLA’s gambling studies program, told the Wall Street Journal. “They are a particularly vulnerable period for lots of mental health issues.”

“There’s never been a massive and rapid expansion of any addictive behavior this quickly I think in any part of American history,” Fong said. “Now that’s a little dramatic, but it’s true.”

In its own May survey, the NCAA reports, “Sports wagering is pervasive among 18- to 22-year-olds, with 58% having engaged in at least one sports betting activity.”

It’s so pervasive that 67% of students living on campus bet on sports and tend to bet with greater regularity, the NCAA reports.

Problem gambling “shows up in this population” in the following ways:

• 16% engaged in at least one risky behavior.

• 6% report losing more than $500 on sports betting in a single day.

• 70% of these risky gamblers believe consistent sports gambling will increase their monetary earnings.

Sports gambling is 'the new Oxycontin’

Sports betting is “the new Oxycontin,” reports the online news commentary site The Free Press.

“For decades, the proportion of Americans diagnosed with ‘pathological gambling’ has held steady at less than 1 percent, according to the International Center for Responsible Gaming — with 7 million Americans believed to be suffering from a gambling addiction at an annual ‘social cost’ of $7 billion. But there are signs those numbers will soon go up: from 2021 to 2022, there was a 45 percent increase in the number of calls, texts, and messages to the National Problem Gambling Helpline.”

A major part of the problem is sports betting apps and their pervasiveness. They use sophisticated algorithms to hook gamblers and keep them wagering.

“The relationship between sports bettors and the growing industry that services them is characterized by a constant interplay,” writes American historian and journalist Oliver Bateman in the British online news and commentary website Unherd.

“Bettors seek to maintain the ideal balance of dopamine hits, spend, and control, while the industry releases an endless stream of innovations and promotions to draw them deeper into their apps.”

Could NCAA impose more controls?

If you go to the NCAA’s website, the organization understands the social costs of this betting and the temptation it creates for student-athletes.

“Sports wagering has the potential to undermine the integrity of sports contests and jeopardizes the well-being of student-athletes and the intercollegiate athletics community.”

So why would the NCAA be eyeing the sports betting market?

Millions wagered: Which companies dominate betting in Arizona?

Baker seemed to imply that the NCAA would create more controls, more protections, around an industry that is now legal in most of the United States, where “anybody who has a phone” can “bet from any place they want and two-thirds to almost three-quarters of all people between the ages of 18 and 22 (are) betting on sports.”

“The truth is, if there are lots of kids on campus betting on college sports and betting on the teams on their campus, this puts student-athletes in a very difficult position. … (The NCAA needs to) create a program that we hope we’re going to get everybody to endorse around helping them develop the tools and techniques (athletes are) going to need to deal with this stuff.”

This needs a national conversation

The NCAA no doubt paid attention when several individual universities cut multimillion-dollar deals with betting companies called “sportsbooks” to, as The New York Times puts it, “introduce their students and sports fans to online gambling.”

But those deals aren’t ending well. At Michigan State, where the university signed a five-year contract for nearly $9 million with Caesar’s Sportsbook, the contract mutually ended after one year.

The final straw came when the American Gaming Association — of which Caesars isn’t a member — banned sportsbook partnerships with universities. After that, the deal dissolved, reports the Lansing State Journal.

So will the NCAA try some sort of macro approach to gambling partnerships? If it does, it will be hard to square with what it now expresses on its website.

“Sports competition should be appreciated for the inherent benefits related to participation of student-athletes, coaches and institutions in fair contests, not the amount of money wagered on the outcome of the competition.”

That’s a contradiction worthy of a national conversation.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: NCAA may allow sports betting on campus. We need to talk about that