Gam-bling Bling
How donor-funded teams support donor-funded bets
When you look at college sports through the harmless, innocuous lens of a sports purist, you can often marvel at how the theater of NCAA athletics unfolds. When you look at sports through the lens of gambling, lines, and dollar bills, it can help drive a narrative that may or may not be accurate. Neither lens is necessarily right or wrong, but you can’t help but think that with so much gambling taking place around athletics, the highly competitive athletes, coaches, and donors aren’t heavily involved in the outcomes.
My conversation a decade ago with ESPN’s lead producer of its entire college sports package made it clear that gambling was already at the forefront of the minds of ESPN’s corporate executives. The telecast of college sports, no less than a decade ago, was sterile and clandestine, focusing only on the competition. But gambling started creeping in. First it was the betting lines on the bottom scrolling ticker. Then it was a small segment in an occasional show. Now it’s full-blown inclusion: ESPN Bet, touts and pontificators employed and sourced by ESPN, and specific mentions of how a game’s scoring—or lack thereof—could affect the financial fortunes of interested viewers.
Part of the reason the late television slot was so appealing to ESPN in the first place is because all of the fortunes—or losses—of a day’s gambling will often find their way back to the final games of the day. Bettors double down on winnings, chase losses, or otherwise give disproportionately more attention and dollars to the last games on the slate than they would if those same games were played earlier. Pac-12 After Dark, and especially the 9 p.m. Pacific Hawaii kickoff, became the apple of the eye of the gambling community. That also, in part, is to blame for the distribution of college football games across days, slots, and time zones. Sure, it’s for viewership and advertising sales, but it’s also to more highly price the data gleaned from games for resale. The NCAA, desperate for cash, is seeking new ways to fund its enterprise—and the enterprises of its conferences and member institutions. There are more and more gambling opportunities for the NCAA to sell access, information, and sponsorship into. Polymarket, Kalshi, PrizePicks, Underdog, DraftKings, etc., would all gladly take a piece of the NCAA gambling pie, for a fee of course. But the NCAA is quickly trying to figure out how to walk back the anti-gambling narrative that cost Washington head coach Rick Neuheisel his job, USD point guard Brandon Johnson his basketball future, and the normalcy of so many others who were compromised by betting markets.
So with the above as a backdrop—and schools begging for money from their donors and sponsors—a crucial new reality is introduced into the equation for team and school leaders. I will say that I don’t know for certain that any college coaches are gambling on sports. However, I do know that there is a rash of current and former players getting popped, crucified, and identified for gambling—both those in need of the money and those not in need of it. These highly competitive former players can’t seem to turn off the itch for action or the inclination to be better than someone or something else. And you know who coaches the majority of teams in college football? You guessed it: former players. And you know who likes to support their teams most? Former players. It’s gambling by former players, for former players.
Consider this: coaches aren’t fired because they lose too many games, but because they don’t cover enough spreads for alums.
Dave Doeren, the head coach of NC State football, has not won 10 games in a season at NC State across 13 years—not even once. He is 4–6 in bowl games. He thrives at winning some, but never most, of his games. He has never finished a season higher than 20th and has made exactly zero New Year’s Six bowl games. He has earned the place of perhaps even being the 1B sport in terms of NC State fan interest, to the 1A of NC State men’s basketball. But you know what? He covers enough spreads—or covers enough spreads at the right times—to satisfy donors while reducing calls for leadership change. Some coaches noticeably play or target specific players while reducing exposure or benching others. Others may simply share game-plan insights and tendencies they plan to exploit or target with donors and those financially interested in outcomes.
Of course, coaches could have spouses, bookies, friends, or proxies bet on outcomes for them. How many coaches at the college level are carelessly not covering, or deliberately focusing on covering, or materially affecting player production? It’s a question worth asking—and one the NCAA certainly won’t be interested in answering.
I’ve written hundreds of these articles, so I forget if I’ve referenced this previously, but when the NCAA investigated the creation of classes for the exclusive benefit of athletes—aka fake classes—they found rampant occurrence of this behavior. The NCAA punished a handful of schools that had copied the North Carolina template and then failed to investigate further. An organization without a conflict of interest would happily dig deeper. An organization that doesn’t want to invite additional scrutiny simply looks the other way. And that’s what the NCAA did.
I say all of this to say that impermissible and “frowned upon” behavior is practiced regularly, so don’t be surprised when it shows up in the mainstream media. If it does—and it should, though it might not—you heard it here first.