The NCAA announced Wednesday that it will lobby state gambling boards to ban proposition bets, commonly known as "prop bets", in an effort to curb harassment against individual student-athletes.
The NCAA contends that prop bets, which are placed on an individual player's stats, 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.
Prop bets on college sports have already been banned in a dozen states, with Ohio and Maryland ending the practice last month.
Neil Sullivan, the University of Dayton’s vice president and director of athletics, said in a statement to Spectrum News that he’s grateful for the decision because it prioritizes the safety of the athletes.
“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.”
