College basketball point shaving scandal

Billions of dollars a year are now wagered on college basketball legally, while the vast majority of players still get paid basically nothing, despite the new world of NIL deals and the like.

So this is about as shocking as the sun rising in the east:

Federal investigators from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania have advanced their probe of point shaving and game fixing in college basketball, multiple sources tell Sports Illustrated, conducting interviews with players suspected of manipulating their performances for the benefit of gamblers who wagered on their games. The investigation covers multiple regions and teams, sources say, with a current focus on “Southern schools.” 

The probe is believed to be heading toward the indictment stage.

“There are going to be charges,” a source with knowledge of the investigation says. “It’s going to be national in scope. It’s going to involve multiple players and programs.”

The EDPA investigation dovetails with the Eastern District of New York’s inquiry centering on the gambling ring that was involved with former NBA player Jontay Porter, sources say. . . .

SI reported in February that authorities are looking into links between the ring that has been charged in the Porter case and wagering on at least nine college games across the last two seasons. Gambling monitoring services flagged unusual wagers on games involving at least five college teams—and investigators have been prepared for that number to increase. The NCAA also is performing its own investigations of a number of programs, with infractions cases or eligibility inquiries involving players at New Orleans, Eastern Michigan, Mississippi Valley State and Temple. 

It’s not clear whether the players from those institutions are under criminal investigation, or whether the NCAA will charge them or their schools with violations. Inquiries initiated by alerts from gambling compliance agencies may not all lead to findings of wrongdoing, sources say.

I mean if an NBA player like Porter, who had a seven-figure salary, and whose brother has a nine-figure max deal, is willing to torch his career after being subjected to the right inducements, imagine what some broke 20-year-old naive kid with a 24/7 bookmaker in his pocket might be willing to do? Sounds like pretty soon we won’t have to imagine.

We know that rats given access to cocaine via a pellet bar will hit that bar until they do nothing else, and either die of an overdose of the drug, or of simple starvation because they forget to eat.  People are not rats, but it’s clear that addiction makes smart people stupid, and stupid ones even more so.  Thus it’s hardly surprising that the gradual legalization of various previously banned substances and activities is having some very troubling social and political effects.

For example, legal sports betting revenue increased from $430 million in 2018 to $11 billon in 2023, that is, a 25-fold increase in five years.  Note that these figures for revenue represent total bets minus total payouts, so total legal sports betting was probably around $150 billion in 2024.  This works out to about $600 per year legally wagered on sports by the “average” American adult.  Of course the vast majority of adults wagered zero, so this means that around 20% of the adult population – 50 million people – averaged something like $3,000 in sports betting, with the top deciles in this group averaging many times that.

This is part of the Crisis of Young Men story, and probably a sizeable one.  For whatever reason – poor impulse control until later in life than we’d like, general despair at social prospects, etc. – these young men are inveterate pressers of the pellet bar.  Weed, games, gambling, porn: they hit them at much higher rates than everyone else.  And we’ve put a lot of pellet bars in immediate reach.

Gambling is probably the best of those activities at sucking away money, now that 91% of the population – the percentage of the population with a smartphone – is walking around with a bookmaker available 24/7 in its collective pocket.  This is the money going away from young men on their couches – the exact demographic that careened most sharply towards Donald Trump in the last election – and that provides the base of the misogynistic Incel Nation that helped create a forty-one point gender gap in support for Trump between men and women under the age of 30.

From The Triumph of Stupidity