New Jersey State Sen. Kristin Corrado introduced legislation this week that would prohibit sportsbooks in New Jersey from offering or accepting wagers on player-specific proposition bets in collegiate sports.
Corrado sponsored S-3080 with the belief that “proposition bets have led to a rise in the harassment of student-athletes and have threatened the integrity of college sports.” She also said that she has “heard about many individuals who have been the victim of online harassment because they didn’t perform to the expectation of a bettor” and that she hopes the bill will help curb that "appalling behavior, and make college athletic events safer for all participants.”
New Jersey sports betting is one of the most prominent markets in all of legal sports betting. Sportsbooks in New Jersey just set state records for sports betting handle and revenue numbers in January, earning $1.7 billion and $170.8 million respectively.
New Jersey would join a growing list of states that have implemented bans on college player props. Ohio, Maryland, Louisiana, and Vermont removed them from their sports betting catalogs in the last few months.
NCAA urging all states
NCAA president Charlie Baker has been crusading against college player props, citing harassment of student-athletes, coaches, and officials as a threat to the sanctity of college athletics. He issued a statement in late March calling on all states to ban college prop bets “to protect student-athletes and to protect the integrity of the game.”
With sports betting on the rise, the NCAA is acting to protect student-athletes from harassment and working to protect the integrity of the game – this week shows why it’s so important to act. pic.twitter.com/krATwpS4hZ
— NCAA News (@NCAA_PR) March 27, 2024
Baker also confirmed this week that the NCAA has a third-party company that’s providing social media surveillance to spot and respond to instances of harassment.
“If they see anything they think is inappropriate, they notify the platform and ask them to shut those people down,” Baker told reporters at Monday’s men’s basketball championship game. “If they see stuff that they’re really worried about, they notify the authorities. And that’s happened in a few instances.”
Montana is bucking the trend and has respectfully declined the NCAA’s request to ban college player prop betting. The Montana Lottery was contacted by the NCAA in early April regarding the organization’s campaign to ban college player prop betting. Montana Lottery director Bob Brown responded in a letter on April 3 saying that the state supports the NCAA’s efforts to curb student-athlete harassment, but they are not about to take college player props off the board at the Sports Bet Montana.
Here's the letter. The Montana Lottery heard from the NCAA last week and says it supports the organization's efforts to reduce harassment of student-athletes by sports bettors. However, Brown says Montana has not seen any of the issues that may have occurred nationally. pic.twitter.com/PXv9J4J3S3
— Geoff Zochodne (@GeoffZochodne) April 4, 2024
With Montana’s polite refusal, there are still 20 states that offer college player props in some form in their betting catalogs: Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
Scope of the problem
As legal sports betting grows across the United States, so has public image problems and the potential harassment of college athletes is not a good look for the industry.
Armando Bacot, a star for UNC men’s basketball, told reporters after his team’s second-round win over Michigan State that he “got over probably 100 DMs from people just telling me like, ‘you suck, you didn’t hit the over!’”
He even said that a DoorDash delivery person complained “y’all messed up my parlay.”
Interactions like this are exactly what Baker and the NCAA hope to eradicate from the world of sports that now has legal sports betting intensely intertwined. According to a report from investment banking firm Citizens JMP Securities, almost $200 million in annual gaming revenue could be “at risk” with additional college player prop betting bans. College sports accounted for $1.6 billion of U.S. sports betting revenue last year, with college props making up a small portion of that overall figure.
