NCAA president Charlie Baker offered reassurances that the NCAA has its ducks in a row when it comes to its gambling policies after the FBI on Thursday charged the head coach of the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers and a player for the Miami Heat, along with more than 30 other people, in a takedown of two sprawling gambling operations.
"We are grateful for federal law enforcement's efforts to stamp out illegal sports betting, and I am proud that the NCAA continues to have the most aggressive competition integrity policies in place," Baker wrote in a statement that was posted online. "The Association has and will continue to pursue sports betting violations using a layered integrity monitoring program for over 22,000 contests, but we still need more states, regulators and gaming companies to help in this effort by eliminating risky prop bets to reduce opportunities for manipulation."
Baker's comments come on the same day that the NCAA's D-II and D-III Management Councils adopted legislation that will allow athletes and staff in those divisions to bet on professional sports.
The FBI announced Thursday that it had Portland coach Chauncey Billups was charged with participating in a conspiracy to fix high-stakes card games tied to La Cosa Nostra organized crime families that cheated unsuspecting gamblers out of at least $7 million. Heat guard Terry Rozier was accused in a separate scheme of exploiting private information about players to win bets on NBA games.
According to the Associated Press, Joseph Nocella, the top federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of New York, called it “one of the most brazen sports corruption schemes since online sports betting became widely legalized in the United States.”
“My message to the defendants who’ve been rounded up today is this: Your winning streak has ended,” Nocella said. “Your luck has run out.”
FBI director Kash Patel stressed the scale of the operation at press conference Thursday.
“The fraud is mind boggling,” FBI Director Kash Patel told reporters. “We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars in fraud and theft and robbery across a multiyear investigation.”
In his statement, Baker stressed the following steps the NCAA has taken to police gambling at the college level:
- The NCAA is the only major sports league in the U.S. to prohibit any commercial partnerships with sports books.
- The enforcement staff has opened investigations into potential sports betting violations by approximately 30 current or former men's basketball student-athletes. Some of those cases have already been resolved.
- Over 150,000 student-athletes have participated in NCAA gambling education through in-person and online training sessions.
- Through the NCAA's partnership with EPIC Global Solutions, a comprehensive gambling harm and student-athlete protection education program has been made available to all NCAA campuses and conferences with a blend of delivery options including in-person education workshops and seminars, prerecorded sessions, and on-demand virtual resources.
- The Association has successfully petitioned four states to eliminate prop bets on college athletes. Click here for more information on NCAA's response to sports betting.
