Feds also said Thaddeus Brown, an assistant at San Diego in 2006-7, and Brandon Dowdy, who played at San Diego in 2006-7 and transferred to UC-Riverside, approached a Riverside player this season.
Jay Kornegay, vice president of racing and sports betting operations at the Las Vegas Hilton, said a San Diego game from the 2009-10 season raised slight suspicion, and it happened on Dec. 4, 2009 , when the odds on San Diego’s game at UC-Riverside started with San Diego as a 2 ½-point favorite and ended with San Diego as a 1-point underdog. Riverside won, 58-55. Johnson shot 2 of 10 for San Diego and Dowdy shot 1 of 4.
“We’re still looking at other games,” Kornegay said. “We found nothing. We have not had the opportunity to examine it in depth.
Sports betting has long captured the attention of the NCAA, but it has proven difficult to curtail. A 2008 NCAA studyshowed that 1.6 percent of male basketball players said they had been asked to influence the outcome of a game, 2 percent had bet on their own team, and 1.4 percent had bet on another team from their own university.
The NCAA spends hundreds of thousands of dollars each year on gambling prevention. FBI agents talk to teams in the men’s and women’s round of 16 in the NCAA tournament, and a consultant monitors point spreads in Las Vegas. But in a case like San Diego’s, enforcing the law can be difficult. The San Diego indictments, for example, grew out of an investigation into marijuana distribution.
“I think you hit on a central issue when you talk about sports betting, the fact is that it’s often linked to organized crime in one way or another,” Roe Lach said. “In trying to uncover a sports betting problem, it usually involves a much deeper circle that is largely outside the jurisdiction of the NCAA.”
