In a memo sent to the NCAA last week, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey urged the association to rescind its decision to permit college athletes to wager on professional sports, describing the move as a “major step in the wrong direction.”
After a discussion about the issue during their in-person meetings on Oct. 13, the SEC presidents and chancellors are “clear and united” that the NCAA’s move should be reversed, Sankey writes in the two-page letter, which was obtained by Yahoo Sports.
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Any concerns over the previous policy to prohibit athletes to bet on all sports should be addressed not “through a wholesale removal of the guardrails” but “careful refinement” of the policy, the SEC contends. The reversal of the ban threatens the “integrity of competition” and makes athletes more “vulnerable” to exploitation, Sankey writes. “What might begin as casual betting can quickly spiral into something far more serious.”
“The SEC’s Presidents and Chancellors believe the NCAA should restore its prior policy — or a modified policy — communicating a prohibition on gambling by student-athletes and athletics staff, regardless of the divisional level of their sport,” Sankey says in the letter.
Governing committees over all three NCAA divisions voted to lift the betting ban on pro sports over the last few weeks, and the measure was expected to be implemented on Saturday. However, the Division I Board of Directors, in a regularly scheduled meeting on Tuesday, is expected to discuss the issue. The 16-member board, made up mostly of university presidents, includes a representative from the SEC: Ole Miss chancellor Glenn Boyce.
On Oct. 8, the NCAA DI Cabinet, the governing body just below the board of directors, voted to lift the prohibition on pro sports gambling while re-emphasizing its rule to ban athletes from wagering on college sports. Since then, several university administrators and coaches have spoken publicly criticizing the move at a time when college athletes are earning millions of dollars in new money from schools as part of a revenue-sharing concept and NIL compensation.
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Most recently, Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi ripped the association’s move, calling it “the stupidest decision I’ve ever seen.”
Shortly after the committee’s decision, Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor reacted on social media, “What are we thinking? This makes no sense to me.”
The SEC does have a representative on the DI council, South Carolina athletic director Jeremiah Donati.
In the NCAA announcement of the decision, DI council chair Josh Whitman, the Illinois athletic director, said that committee members remain concerned about the risks of sports gambling but ultimately voted to overturn the pro-sports ban to “better align with their campus peers.”
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In a way, the move is in line with many other evolutionary changes within college athletics, most notably adjustments to NCAA rules to loosen prohibitions around player movement (transfer) and player compensation (NIL). These changes — a way to avoid legal challenges, too — aligned college athletes with their normal student body peers, who can earn compensation from their NIL, transfer schools freely and gamble on pro sports.
In fact, with its announcement, the NCAA included comments from the National Council on Problem Gambling saying that the decision is a way to create more opportunities for athletes to “speak openly about their gambling behavior” and “enable access” to seek help. The rule change was also supported by the DI Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, which requested that the change come with continued and enhanced education and support for college athletes on gambling.
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The NCAA provides athletes with several avenues to seek help for gambling problems, including documents outlining sports betting resources, and mental health best practices, as well as launching an e-learning module and conducting ongoing research to better understand gambling behaviors. Data from one survey indicates that 67% of college students engage in sports betting on a somewhat regular basis.
The NCAA’s decision does not prevent an individual conference or school from banning their athletes to bet on pro sports. While local policies “may be considered” eventually, Sankey writes in his letter that “the NCAA’s policy has long stood as an expression of our collective integrity, and its removal sends the wrong signal at a time when the gambling industry is expanding its reach and influence.”
The SEC’s letter highlights the most recent sports gambling scandal in the NBA, which shows that “even coaches and athletes with extensive oversight, education and support systems” can get caught in conduct that compromises competition.
“It is foreseeable that college athletes, with far fewer resources and far greater outside influence, can be involved in compromising circumstances,” Sankey writes.
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In its announcement of the change on Oct. 8, the NCAA says its enforcement staff’s caseload involving sports betting violations has continued to increase in recent years, in which most of the violations “involve conduct that directly impacts the integrity of college sports.” The NCAA uses a layered strategy with integrity monitoring services to monitor more than 22,000 college sports games each year to detect unusual line activities.
In September, the NCAA Committee on Infractions released the first infractions cases for former men’s basketball athletes who bet on their own games and in some cases engaged in game manipulation for sports betting reasons. The enforcement staff is also in the process of alleging similar violations for another 13 athletes from six other NCAA schools.
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