One in three high-profile athletes receive abusive messages from people with a “gambling interest,” and more than 540 men's and women's college basketball players received similar abuse, including death threats, during championships in March, the NCAA said in a statement on Friday.
The NCAA examined athletes participating in sports that attract the most betting interest (football and basketball, among others) and found that online abuse is widespread. Signify, an artificial intelligence company and NCAA partner, covered 1,000 Division I men's and women's college basketball players, 64 teams, more than 200 coaches and 120 NCAA game officials during March Madness. The analysis, part of an NCAA initiative aimed at combating online abuse and harassment, found 4,000 posts or comments that were confirmed to be abusive or threatening during March Madness.
The NCAA said data showed that female basketball players received about three times as many overall threats as male players and that 15 to 25 percent of the abuse targeted players, coaches and officials participating in the most popular college sports. It was related to gambling.
“People who harass athletes, amateur or professional, over a sports bet should not be tolerated,” Joe Maloney, senior vice president of strategic communications for the American Gaming Association, told ESPN in a statement. “Importantly, the legal sports betting market is providing the critical transparency to discuss solutions to reduce player harassment for the first time, an opportunity not provided by illegal market players. We look forward to continuing our dialogue with the NCAA, the professional leagues and other stakeholders in the shared universal goal of reducing harassment of athletes.”
In March, Armando Bacot, a forward for the North Carolina men's basketball team, told reporters that he received dozens of direct messages on social media criticizing him for his performance in the Tar Heels' victory over Michigan State in the second round of the NCAA tournament.
“It's terrible,” Bacot said. “Even the last game, I guess I didn't get enough rebounds or something. I thought I played pretty well the last game, but I looked at my DMs and I got like 100+ messages from people telling me I sucked and stuff.” So because I didn't get enough rebounds.”
The data released coincides with the NCAA's efforts to ban sportsbooks from offering prop bets to college players. Prop bets include bets such as over/under on a player's points or rebounds. Ohio, Louisiana, Maryland and Vermont have passed recent laws banning prop betting on college gamblers, and more states are considering the issue.
Joe Brennan, a longtime Internet gaming consultant and now CEO of online sportsbook Prime Sports, believes the NCAA is looking at the issue “through the wrong end of the telescope.”
“This is, first and foremost, a social media problem,” Brennan said. “The NCAA's demand to ban college players' gear is a distraction from the root causes and possible solutions. Abusive speech towards teams and players is a sad reality in competitive sports… It is unfortunate that betting sports have now also become another topic in this, but it certainly wasn't the beginning.”
