Ethics CasesSport

Cases · NCAA / state regulators · 2018–2025

College Athletes, Player Prop Bets, and Harassment by Bettors

Since legal sports betting spread after 2018, wagers on individual college athletes' statistics ("player props") have become widely available in some states. College athletes, many of them teenagers and none of them paid like professionals until recently, have reported abuse from bettors on social media, and integrity investigators have flagged manipulation risks. In 2024, NCAA President Charlie Baker urged states to ban college player props; by 2025, a growing number of states had done so. NCAA studies found that a significant share of Division I athletes in high-profile sports reported betting-related harassment. This dilemma-style policy case asks whether college athletes should be off-limits to individual betting.

By Tanner Simkins, editor

Timeline

  1. Murphy v. NCAA allows states to legalize sports betting.
  2. Investigations into betting by athletes and staff at several universities, including Alabama's move to fire its baseball coach over suspicious wagers, put college betting integrity in the spotlight.
  3. At the NCAA's request, Ohio regulators ban player-prop bets on college athletes.
  4. NCAA President Charlie Baker publicly urges states with legal betting to ban college player props.
  5. The NCAA publishes studies on online abuse, including betting-related harassment of athletes during March Madness, and launches an anti-harassment campaign.
  6. Baker testifies before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about sports betting's effects on college sports.
  7. An NCAA survey finds that over one-third of Division I men's basketball players reported betting-related abuse in the prior year.

The ethical issues

  • Protecting young athletes vs. adult bettors' freedom and states' tax revenue.
  • Manipulation risk: one athlete can alter a stat line more easily than a result.
  • Harassment and mental health: social-media abuse after losing bets.
  • Consistency: banning props in some states but not others; prediction markets may bypass bans.
  • NIL and professionalization: as athletes are paid, are they still "amateurs" deserving special protection?

Stakeholders

StakeholderInterests & obligations
College athletesSafety, mental health, and freedom from coercion; their own duty not to bet or share inside information.
NCAA and member schoolsIntegrity of competition; duty of care to students.
State legislators and regulatorsBalancing tax revenue, consumer choice, and harm prevention.
SportsbooksMarket offerings and integrity monitoring obligations.
BettorsChoice and entertainment; responsibility for abusive conduct.
Social-media platformsModerating threats and abuse directed at athletes.

The case

Once states could legalize sports betting after Murphy v. NCAA, sportsbooks competed to offer more and more markets.[6] Among the most popular are “player props”: bets on whether an individual will exceed a statistical line, such as a quarterback’s passing yards or a point guard’s assists. In professional sports, props are mainstream. In college sports, they put individual students at the center of the betting market.

College athletes differ from professionals in ways that matter to this debate. Many are 18 to 22 years old. Until recent changes, most received no salary, and many still earn little. They are highly visible, often on social media, and they live on campuses where classmates and strangers can easily reach them. NCAA rules bar athletes and staff from betting on any sport the NCAA sponsors.

Background

The legal landscape was created in part by the NCAA’s own defeat. In 1992 Congress passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which barred states from authorizing sports betting, with exemptions for Nevada, Delaware, Oregon and Montana.[6] When New Jersey legalized wagering in 2012, the NCAA joined the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB in suing to block it, arguing that legal gambling harmed their sports.[6] On May 14, 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that PASPA unconstitutionally commandeered state lawmaking and struck down the whole law.[6] By 2026, 27 states had legalized online sports betting.[6]

The campus setting makes college athletes unusually exposed. In his 2024 Senate testimony, Baker noted that college athletes attend classes, live in dorms and eat in dining halls alongside fellow students. He cited an NCAA survey finding that 67% of on-campus students aged 18 to 22 bet on sports, and that 41% of college students who bet had wagered on their own school’s teams.[5] He quoted athletes describing abuse, including a North Carolina basketball player who said he received over 100 messages after a game in which bettors felt he had not grabbed enough rebounds.[5]

The rules and governance

Authority is split. States license sportsbooks and decide which markets they may offer. The NCAA cannot ban bets, only ask regulators to. Its own bylaws govern only athletes and staff, who may not bet on NCAA-sponsored sports.[1][5] By Baker’s December 2024 count, four states (Louisiana, Maryland, Ohio and Vermont) had banned individual college prop bets through commission orders. About 20 of the 39 jurisdictions that had legalized betting, or soon would, still allowed college props in some form.[5] Ohio and West Virginia had also passed laws targeting betting-related harassment, and Wyoming’s regulators approved rules allowing harassers to be placed on involuntary exclusion lists.[5]

Integrity monitoring is the other half of the system. The NCAA said it used a commercial provider to monitor betting markets, expanding from more than 13,000 contests a year in 2018 to more than 22,000. It also screened and educated more than 20,000 officials in sports with betting markets.[5] Baker asked Congress for a federal definition of betting-related harassment, power for regulators to bar harassers from betting, and shared lists of prohibited bettors across states.[5]

Harassment and manipulation

By 2023 and 2024, athletes and coaches were describing abuse from bettors: messages blaming players for losing bets, sometimes with threats, and sometimes sent to family members. The NCAA began monitoring public social-media abuse aimed at athletes during championships. Its studies found that a meaningful share of the abuse was betting-related and was concentrated around March Madness.[3] A 2025 NCAA survey found that over one-third of Division I men’s basketball players reported receiving betting-related abuse in the previous year.[2]

Integrity concerns grew at the same time. Investigations at several universities involved athletes betting on games, and in May 2023 the University of Alabama moved to fire its head baseball coach after surveillance video linked him to a bettor wagering on the team’s game against LSU. He resigned, and in February 2024 the NCAA gave him a 15-year show-cause penalty.[7] Integrity experts warned that prop bets created an especially dangerous incentive: one athlete could affect a stat line without affecting the outcome, and an athlete with little money or with gambling debts might be approached.[5]

The push for bans

In early 2024, Ohio regulators, at the NCAA’s request, banned prop bets on individual college athletes, citing harassment. In March 2024, NCAA President Charlie Baker, a former Massachusetts governor, publicly urged every state with legal betting to do the same, arguing that prop bets on college athletes threaten the integrity of competition and expose students to harassment.[1] The NCAA also launched an awareness campaign telling bettors not to harass athletes.[4] In December 2024, Baker testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about betting’s effects on college sports.[5]

Aftermath

The NCAA’s own rules were tested next. Division I briefly approved a change that would have let athletes and athletics staff bet on professional sports. After a 30-day period, two-thirds of Division I schools voted to rescind it, the NCAA announced on November 21, 2025. The ban on betting on any sport in which the NCAA holds a championship stayed in place for all three divisions.[8]

Then came the scenario integrity experts had warned about. On January 15, 2026, federal prosecutors in Philadelphia announced charges against 26 people in an alleged bribery and point-shaving scheme. According to the indictment, fixers recruited players during the 2023–24 and 2024–25 seasons. They offered bribes “usually ranging from $10,000 to $30,000 per game” for helping their teams fail to cover the spread in a half or a full game. Prosecutors said the scheme involved more than 39 players on more than 17 Division I teams and more than 29 games. They said the fixers “specifically targeted college players for whom the bribe payments would meaningfully supplement, or exceed,” their legitimate name, image and likeness income, and favored players on underdog teams. “The stakes here are far higher than anything on a bet slip,” said U.S. Attorney David Metcalf. The charges are accusations, and every defendant is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.[9]

The core dilemma

Should states, and the sport itself, carve college athletes out of individual-performance betting to protect them from harassment and manipulation? Or is that paternalistic, ineffective, or inconsistent as college athletes become paid performers?

Competing values

  • Protection vs. liberty: shielding young athletes vs. adults’ freedom to bet on lawful events.
  • Integrity vs. regulated transparency: removing temptation vs. keeping betting in monitored markets.
  • Amateur status vs. professionalization: special protection for students vs. equal treatment as paid athletes.
  • State autonomy vs. uniform standards: a patchwork of bans vs. national consistency.

Strongest arguments

For banning college player props: college athletes are young, accessible, and economically vulnerable. Prop bets make individuals targets for abuse and corruption in a way team-outcome bets do not, and the costs fall on students rather than on the sportsbooks that profit.

Against bans: harassment is the fault of abusers, and should be addressed through platforms and law enforcement. Bans push bets offshore, where no one monitors them. As college athletes become paid professionals, singling them out for protection is increasingly hard to justify.

Applying the frameworks

Ethics of care

The care lens starts with the athletes: young people, often without professional support staff, receiving abuse because of strangers’ bets. It asks what the NCAA, schools, sportsbooks and platforms owe them in protection and support, and whether the betting industry’s commercial interests have been allowed to outweigh their wellbeing.

Utilitarian

Consequentialists weigh the harms of prop bets (harassment, integrity risks, pressure on athletes with little money) against the benefits of regulated markets: tax revenue, consumer choice and integrity monitoring that might otherwise not happen if bettors move offshore. Evidence matters here. Baker argued that no black market had flourished in states that never allowed college props; operators argue otherwise.

Kantian (duty)

A Kantian lens asks whether it is right to make individual students the object of a market they did not consent to and do not profit from. Treating an athlete’s stat line as a betting product, while the athlete bears the abuse, may use students as a means. The lens also asks about the NCAA’s duties: having lost the fight against legal betting, does it have a duty to push for protections, even against its commercial partners?

Walk it through: the Simple Decision Model

  1. Spot the issue. You are a state gaming regulator considering a ban on college player props after reports of harassment. The stakeholders include college athletes, schools, the NCAA, licensed operators, bettors, the state treasury and integrity monitors. The codes in play are state gaming law, your commission’s rules and NCAA bylaws.
  2. Gather facts. What evidence do you have about harassment and integrity incidents linked to props in your state? What do you not know about where bettors would go if props were banned?
  3. Test options. Options: (a) ban all college player props; (b) ban props only on in-state schools; (c) keep props but add harassment penalties and exclusion lists. Weigh care for athletes against market and revenue effects.
  4. Check codes and law. Check your legal authority and whether your choice treats college athletes consistently with professionals and with other states’ approaches.
  5. Decide and document. Record the evidence, consultations and reasons, including operator and NCAA submissions.
  6. Communicate and follow up. Announce the decision with an explanation, coordinate with neighboring states, and set a date to review the data on harassment and integrity.

What’s settled and what’s contested

  • Settled: NCAA rules bar athletes from betting; numerous states have banned college player props; NCAA surveys document betting-related harassment.
  • Contested: whether bans reduce harm or merely displace betting; whether college athletes should be treated differently from professionals; how to handle prediction markets.

Why this case matters

This is a practical policy debate that athletic departments, conferences, and legislators face right now. It also illustrates a general principle: products designed for adult professionals can affect younger and more vulnerable participants in very different ways.

Key terms

Integrity
A commitment to honesty and ethical principle in competition and administration, including when nobody is watching.
Duty of care
The responsibility of coaches, organizations and institutions to protect the health, safety and well-being of those in their charge. It is not a license for total control.
Controls
Concrete safeguards that make ethics operational: training, disclosure forms, testing, monitoring, hotlines. Ethics needs principles, process and controls.
Trust
The public’s belief that what they are watching is real. Integrity failures are ultimately failures of trust.

Definitions from the Ethics Cases glossary.

Discussion questions

  1. Should betting on individual college athletes' performances be banned? Weigh the interests of athletes, bettors, and states.
  2. Does the arrival of NIL deals and direct revenue sharing weaken the argument that college athletes need special protection from betting?
  3. Who is morally responsible for harassment by bettors: the individuals, the sportsbooks, the platforms, or the states that authorized the bets?
  4. Is a patchwork of state bans meaningful when bettors can cross state lines or use alternative markets?
  5. What duties do universities have to protect athletes from the betting industry that their conferences sometimes partner with?

Sources

  1. NCAA President Charlie Baker urges states with legal wagering to ban prop bets on college athletes — Associated Press
  2. NCAA study finds over one-third of DI men's basketball student-athletes harassed by bettors — NCAA
  3. NCAA calls on fans, social media platforms to curb abuse as it releases first online harassment study — NCAA
  4. 'Don't Be a Loser': NCAA launches sports betting anti-harassment video — NCAA
  5. Testimony of Charlie Baker before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dec. 17, 2024 — U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary
  6. Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association — Wikipedia
  7. Brad Bohannon — Wikipedia
  8. DI schools rescind betting rules change; Ban on pro sports betting remains in place (Nov. 21, 2025) — NCAA
  9. 26 People Charged in Alleged Bribery and Point-Shaving Scheme to Fix NCAA, CBA Men's Basketball Games (Jan. 15, 2026) — U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of Pennsylvania