Online commenters may not be the most insightful people on Earth, but many of those who responded to a Washington Post story on the latest basketball fixing scandal got it right.
“You want to protect competition integrity?” one asked. “Don’t allow sports gambling. That’ll help a lot.”
No kidding.
This is becoming more evident with each new scandal, but never so much as now, with indictments alleging 29 recent college basketball games were fixed.
For even average American sports fans, alarm bells ought to be ringing. For die-hard fans, the earth should be moving.
Gamblers are losing faith in games
Regular sports bettors don’t like to think of themselves as chumps. So when Casino Guru News released a survey of 2,000 of them on this subject Thursday, it was worth paying attention. It found 54% of them saying the recent rash of betting scandals “have reduced their trust in professional sports.”
The publication said the gamblers may be signaling a shift. “Betting-related scandals are not being dismissed as isolated incidents, and concerns about integrity are no longer fringe views among bettors — they are increasingly part of how sports are watched, judged, and discussed,” an analysis by Holly Sandrove said.
Are the games real or just scripted theater?
Taxpayers on the hook
As I have said before, local and state governments, as well as private investors, are spending billions of dollars constructing stadiums, arenas and other sports amenities based on the assumption that everything is real. Utah has entered this competition big time.
The Delta Center is under renovation to better accommodate the NHL. Plans are in the works for a sports and entertainment district near the arena downtown, and the state has pledged a lot of money for a Major League Baseball stadium on Salt Lake City’s west side, should baseball decide to expand here.
If not the owners or investors, surely political leaders and college presidents ought to be tearing down the doors of league offices, backing commissioners into a corner and demanding to know what they intend to do about the integrity of the games.
The latest twist, a 70-page indictment, alleges 26 people, many of them former and current NCAA basketball players and five so-called “fixers,” were involved in rigging college games in the United States and professional games in China.
This, observers say, rivals a 1951 point-shaving scandal that is considered the biggest gambling scheme in college basketball history.
Reaping the whirlwind
But it’s not isolated, as recent scandals have rocked the NBA and other professional sports leagues. And, not coincidentally, it comes against the backdrop of a legal gambling culture that was set in motion by a 2018 Supreme Court decision. Today, 38 states, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, allow sports gambling, while sports books saturate game-day broadcasts with commercials.
In announcing the indictments, U.S. Attorney David Metcalf said these circumstances are not coincidental, according to an NBC News report.
“I will say that the evidence in this case shows that the monetization of college athletics and athletics generally ... furthered the enterprise in this case,” Metcalf said.
In addition to so-called “prop” bets, in which people can wager concerning how individual athletes will perform in specific areas of the game, many players now are paid by their schools for the use of their names, images and likenesses. These NIL payments have created a vulnerable subclass of disgruntled players who feel they are being undervalued.
Les Bernal, national director of the advocacy group Stop Predatory Gambling, told me the evidence is now “overwhelming” that America’s experiment with legalized gambling is a “huge failure.”
So far, the NCAA’s response has been a plea to cut back on prop bets and to end the practice of betting on halftime scores.
Bernal said anyone who believes this can be solved by tinkering with legal gambling believes “a fairy tale.”
Bernal believes sports’ embrace of legal gambling says something about our nation.
“What we incentivize shapes our national character,” he said, adding that he believes “this is the No. 1 exhibit about what is broken in our country today.”
The online commenters had it right. The only way to fix the fixing and save the integrity of games is to end the legal wagers completely.