Chickens coming home to roost re: betting on college sports

I’m old enough to remember when the gambling industry was kept at arms-length from college sports.  It was a noble attempt to try and preserve some integrity for extracurricular activities at institutions of higher learning across the country.

Well, the cockroaches with fat bank accounts broke through the firewall and have managed to seriously blur the differences between NCAA football and basketball and the NBA and NFL.

When I first heard that Phil Berger & the boys were going to open up our state to college sports betting, I saw the potential for trouble.  You don’t just bet on the final score.  People bet on over / unders for rebounds, assists, and points (team total or individual totals).  It’s possible that a big gambler can team up with a current college (or pro) player to make those numbers turn out to be whatever they *need* to be. 

Investigations into competition integrity have apparently already opened up:

Four men went to a New Jersey casino in March 2024, at the start of the men’s NCAA Tournament. While most of the attention in the sports world was on a pair of games in Dayton, Ohio, that would decide which teams would get the final spots in the round of 64, the men were focused on a forgettable NBA game, the Toronto Raptors hosting the Sacramento Kings. They were ready to make what they believed were the surest bets of their lives.

At about 6:30 that Wednesday evening, according to legal filings, one of those men, Mahmud Mollah, took cash in a blue bag and transferred it into his account with a casino, then made more than $100,000 in wagers on prop bets for Jontay Porter, a little-known center with the Raptors. Mollah’s bets all wagered that Porter would not reach the points, rebounds and assist thresholds the casino set for him in that game.

Putting that much money on a player few NBA fans even knew might seem risky, but Mollah and the other men were confident in the outcome: They had been talking directly with Porter for months. He had given them an assurance before the game that he would take himself out early and claim he was ill. This sequence of events, and other details of the scheme, are based on legal filings made by the Department of Justice in three cases over the last year. […]

[…] Since last year, the FBI has been investigating what federal prosecutors say is a scheme to fix the play of professional athletes in order to win wagers on their performances. The investigations have so far led to charges for six people, and four of them have already pleaded guilty, including Mollah, McCormack and Porter, who pleaded to one count of wire fraud conspiracy. The others are believed to be in plea negotiations, based on legal filings made by the federal government.

But the investigation has led to what may become one of the most far-reaching scandals to hit sports in decades. The Athletic spoke with more than a dozen people in different corners of the NBA, college sports and betting worlds, including people briefed on the investigation and people with expertise on the wide-ranging intersections between casinos and sports teams. Many of the people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the investigation or because they feared retribution or professional consequences for speaking publicly. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York declined to comment.

The Porter case is also linked to investigations into match-fixing across college sports, sources said, and five schools are being investigated by the federal government for their possible ties to the scheme. Alarms were raised when unnatural betting action moved the line on a Temple-UAB conference tournament game in March 2024; federal law enforcement is looking at whether the same group of bettors can be tied to unusual line movement on other college basketball teams this season as well.

The federal investigation has cast a cloud over college sports and the legalized gambling industry as they await the next turn and wonder how much more expansive the FBI’s findings will be, and who could be implicated. It is the largest conspiracy case yet since sports gambling was legalized for most of the country seven years ago, and the most prominent since the Arizona State point-shaving scandal of the mid-1990s. […] 

[…] Each unusual line movement is scrutinized closely. It may be a sign of potential illegal activity, or it may be what one sportsbook director called “seeing ghosts.”

That’s what had to be discerned when a Jan. 30, 2025 game between UNC Wilmington and North Carolina A&T triggered an alert from U.S. Integrity, which monitors betting lines for irregular activity. The morning of the game, NC A&T suspended three players for reasons that Colonial Athletic Association commissioner Joe D’Antonio said were unrelated to the gambling allegations. The line on that game began with UNC-Wilmington as an 11-point favorite before it surged to a 17.5-point spread. (UNC won by 24.)

“I don’t think there was anything behind that line movement,” the sportsbook director said. “It wasn’t that suspicious; everyone is on high alert.”

NC A&T has been linked to the NCAA’s gambling investigation, but D’Antonio said neither he nor the conference have been contacted by the FBI. The conference has heard from the NCAA, and is allowing the NCAA to run its investigation rather than doing one of its own.[…]