With the proliferation of legal wagering in the United States the past five years, it wasn’t a question of if but when a college sports gambling scandal would become public.
Two have come to light in the past week, the first at Alabama involving its head baseball coach and then an investigation of Iowa and Iowa State athletes participating in online gambling.
“This is probably just the tip of the iceberg,” Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, said Tuesday. “In surveys, the athletes self-report a high rate of gambling participation and sports betting. It wouldn’t surprise us if there’s more problems that surface.”
East Carolina assistant professor Michelle L. Malkin, who researches ties between gambling and criminality, said placing sports bets has become a part of college culture, more so since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 cleared the way for states to legalize sports wagering.
“We can’t think our student-athletes would be acting any different than their friends and peers who are engaged in similar activity that’s been normalized through this mass expansion of legalized gambling,” Malkin said.