College athletes are getting messages from people in their own social circles asking them to intentionally perform badly on specific plays so that someone can cash out a bet. The NCAA president went on national television Sunday to describe it plainly: disgraceful, demeaning, and demoralizing. He is not wrong.
What Baker Actually Said, Because It's Worse Than the Headline
NCAA President Charlie Baker appeared on CBS News' Face the Nation on Sunday, in an interview taped July 1, and spelled out exactly what prop betting has done to the experience of being a college athlete. It is not pretty.
Baker described a scenario where student athletes are regularly being approached by classmates, friends, and even family members with a specific kind of request. As Baker put it, people are saying: "Don't take the first pitch, don't take the first shot, don't catch the first pass. I don't want you to lose the game, but here's all the other things I want you to do, so that I can make money." Read that again. Family members. Asking kids to tank individual plays. For a payout.
He also told viewers to imagine sitting in the stands behind the bench at a major college basketball game and just listening to what gets directed at the players. Baker did not describe what he heard in detail. He did not have to. The picture is already grim enough.
The Numbers Are Not Soft
This is not anecdote. The NCAA has the receipts. A 2024 NCAA report on online abuse at its championships identified nearly 750 instances of sports betting-related abuse and match-fixing allegations, which accounted for 12 percent of all abuse documented across the board.
Then a 2025 study found that 36 percent of Division I men's basketball players reported experiencing abuse on social media tied directly to sports betting within the previous year. More than a third of elite college basketball players. Getting harassed online because of prop bets. In the last twelve months.
Baker said he first heard about the scope of the problem almost immediately after taking the job in spring of 2023, because student athletes kept bringing it up. He noted that the NCAA was the first organization to "really raise the alarm" about prop bets specifically, before the professional leagues started paying attention.
What a Prop Bet Actually Is, Since the Industry Would Prefer You Stay Confused
A proposition bet, or prop bet, is a wager on a specific player's individual performance or on a specific event within a game, rather than simply who wins or loses. You can bet on how many passing yards a quarterback throws, how many points a guard scores, or which team scores first. None of it requires picking a winner.
That structure is the problem. Because if someone bets that a specific player will score under a certain number of points, the incentive becomes hoping that player fails. Or worse, as Baker described, reaching out to that player directly and asking them to fail. The bet is not rooting against the team. It is rooting against a specific kid, personally, and sometimes making sure that kid knows it.
What the NCAA Is Actually Doing About It
Baker said the NCAA runs what he called the largest integrity program in the world, which catches, in his words, "unfortunately, a lot of young people betting on sports." They also run a surveillance operation at all major championships that tracks social media traffic and alerts authorities about accounts sending what Baker described as particularly dangerous content targeting coaches, players, or officials, getting those accounts removed from platforms for the duration of the tournament.
In some cases, the NCAA has gone further, notifying local law enforcement about especially aggressive abuse directed at student athletes. Baker added that earlier this year he called on state gambling commissions to strengthen regulations and eliminate prop bets on individual players. He also pushed the regulatory body that oversees prediction markets to suspend those markets pending new rules.
The professional leagues are starting to move too. According to CBS News, MLB was weighing a full ban on prop betting last year and has implemented some specific restrictions. The NFL has also attempted to crack down. Baker said he has been "really pleased" to watch the leagues start to take it seriously.
How Far Baker Wants This to Go
Baker was direct about his endgame. He wants to "dramatically limit" prop betting broadly, "significantly reduce" it across sports, and at the collegiate level, get rid of all of it. His exact words were that he hopes to "get rid of all of the negative prop bets, and hopefully most of the prop bets" at the college level.
That is a significant ask in a legal sports betting market that has exploded since the Supreme Court opened the door in 2018. State after state has legalized it, and the gambling industry has poured enormous money into lobbying, advertising, and platform development. Baker is essentially asking regulators and lawmakers to claw back a piece of a multi-billion dollar industry that has been operating in plain sight for years. He said the NCAA is "starting to win this discussion" with the public. We will see.
The Dingo Take
Here is what makes this story so clarifying. The entire debate around sports betting legalization was sold to the public as harmless adult entertainment, a clean transaction between a willing gambler and a regulated app. What Baker is describing is the actual downstream reality: college students getting messages from people they know, asking them to intentionally underperform on specific plays so someone can collect. That is not a hypothetical abuse case. That is a feature of how the market works when you can bet on granular individual actions within a game.
The industry will push back, of course. They will argue that abuse happens everywhere online, that bad actors are the exception, that responsible gambling messaging and self-exclusion tools are sufficient. They have been making versions of that argument for years while the abuse reports pile up and 36 percent of Division I basketball players raise their hands to say they have been harassed over bets. At some point the "a few bad apples" framing stops being credible and starts being a business strategy.
Baker is a Republican, a former two-term governor of Massachusetts, and not exactly a fire-breathing progressive. When a guy like that goes on national television and calls the current situation disgraceful and demeaning, it means the industry's political cover is thinning. Whether state legislators have the spine to act against gambling lobby money is a separate question. But the argument that prop betting on college athletes is defensible is becoming very hard to make with a straight face.
