If we’re honest, it was too late.
The fact that it’s been five years since the Supreme Court opened the door for the expansion of sports gambling and a full-blown scandal to hit home in college sports is frankly astounding. In reality, corruption was undoubtedly swirling undetected before the ancients Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon became the cautionary tale.
But with new details emerging this week in Sports Illustrateda combination of sloppy execution and excellent security cameras helped push the inevitable into the headlines and force action from above.
The stakes really couldn’t be much higher.
In an era where tinfoil hat conspiracies are becoming widespread, opening the door with any breadcrumbs to doubt the integrity of rigged or rigged games builds a house of cards.
And with billions of dollars at stake and big fish looking for the slightest advantage, players become (mostly) targets for manipulation or corruption. This has always been true, but with 34 states legalizing sports gambling, the pool is considerably deeper. The temptation to accept a few dollars or more to go to Shoeless Joe’s has never been greater, even in the NIL era.
It was one of the hot topics at the SEC spring meetings in Destin last month. And if we’re still being honest, it doesn’t seem like many new approaches have been thrown off the complex walls. At least in the interviews following the meeting, the reiteration of the anti-gambling educational routine was the main topic of discussion.
“It shocked me,” Texas A&M football coach Jimbo Fisher said when he learned of the quickly expanding Alabama gambling investigation. “When it came out, I mean, you hadn’t heard about it in years. I can’t remember the last time this came out and there were two or three schools.
Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne may have said it best.
“We’re obviously very attentive now that we have a concrete example that we can learn from and we’re going to make sure we do that in the future,” he said, “but we also have done in the past as Good.”
It’s the kicker.
The energy in Destin was high on the educational aspect of it all but, as Byrne said, they were already doing that and didn’t stop a head coach from allegedly becoming “Pete Rose.”
The league called in Mark Holt, head of the U.S. Integrity Monitoring Group, who initially reported the egregious activity that led to Bohannon’s downfall. They took the risk seriously and the concern was there.
But what are we really doing to prevent this from infecting the entire sporting landscape?
That was the simple question I asked SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey during one of the evening press briefings in Destin.
“We use the NCAA rules structure,” he said. “I have not been part of any conversation about changing the rule.”
Well, the NCAA took action.
Less than a month after the SEC packed up and left the beach, the wounded but still functional NCAA updated its rules regarding athletes and gambling. He modernized the structure and proposed levels of punishment for different levels of involvement in the game.
If an athlete is found guilty of influencing the outcome of games or providing inside information to players, they risk losing their eligibility for life. In the past, any gaming activity – whether it was a game they played or an NBA game – resulted in a one-year loss of eligibility.
There is now a nuance with small value bets resulting in the loss of 10% of a season’s eligibility instead of the full boat. And it’s important since the NCAA in May published the results of a study which shows that 58% of 18 to 22 year olds have engaged in at least one sports betting activity. The 3,527 people surveyed were not exclusively athletes either.
Of course, there are levels within the most serial offender group.
As far as we know, Bohannon is not accused of hosting Alabama’s baseball game at LSU in April. He is accused of giving inside information about a late scratch from their Friday pitcher to a gambler who was trying to place six-figure bets on a game that would normally pay no more than a few hundred dollars at most.
Yet even though coaches are not addressed in these new rules, it is widely understood that he will never be trusted to coach another college baseball game.
The athletes, including Iowa and Iowa State football players, remain under investigation related to gambling activities in a separate issue that was released the same week as the baseball in Alabama.
The NFL also faces player suspensions due to gambling, but so far no game integrity concerns have been raised.
With a new football season on the horizon, gambling games joining NIL and transfer controversies as the doomsday countdown approaches, there is an increasing focus on preserving the purity of the competition itself.
Nick Saban said the Alabama football program’s game education included a lecture from former mobster Michael Franzese. The former member of the Colombo crime family is doing the fear and frank circuit given his experience in point-shaving and game-fixing.
“But I think one of the hardest things is when you legalize things and all of a sudden there’s so much more access – people are playing and don’t even know they’re playing on certain of this social media that I don’t even know how to operate, manage or have ever been involved in,” Saban said. “So I think you have to be more diligent in how you approach it with the players so that They understand the consequences of even the smallest thing they do when it comes to gambling.”
We’d be naive to think that the action on fall Saturdays is as pure as the moonlight smuggled into student sections.
And it is too simplistic to assume that new sanctions and reformed capos will neutralize red actors when millions become billions.
But they can try.
Because if we can’t trust the games, a slight breeze could topple this house of cards.
Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ParCasagrande Or on Facebook
