Sports betting on campus: Story ideas from our webinar

In some parts of the country, college sports — especially basketball and football — are more popular and more important to local communities than professional sports. That means athletes who also happen to be students often encounter intense scrutiny from the news media and fans. Add sports betting into a cultural landscape where every first down and every missed bucket matters, and that scrutiny becomes more intense. It also means that college students can, in many states, bet on the games in which their classmates play. With name, image and likeness, or NIL, deals in the mix, some athletes are paid hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars all the while opportunities to bet on sports are, seemingly, everywhere. We recently convened an hourlong webinar with EconoFact, a nonpartisan publication out of Tufts University, to help journalists gain nuance and understanding of how the vast availability of sports betting affects athletes and non-athletes in higher education. I moderated the discussion with Michael Klein, the William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs at Tufts and founder of EconoFact. We were joined by Jodi Balsam, professor of clinical law and director of the Sports Law Clinic at Brooklyn Law School, and Nicole Kraft, professor of journalism practice and director of the Sports and Society Institute at The Ohio State University. We opened the hour discussing the case of Brendan Sorsby, a former college quarterback who placed thousands of sports wagers worth at least $90,000 from 2022 to 2025, according to multiple reports. Sorsby had committed to playing for Texas Tech in January, with an NIL deal estimated at about $5 million. After Sorsby’s wagering became public, the NCAA ruled him permanently ineligible for violating the organization’s rules on gambling. In early June, a district court judge in Lubbock County, where Texas Tech is located, ruled that Sorsby would suffer “irreparable injury” if he were not allowed to play, effectively paving the way for the quarterback to take the field. The NCAA appealed. “The theory of the appeal was that it would undermine the integrity of college sports, that it basically rewrites these member-adopted rules around sports integrity,” Balsam said during the webinar. She added that the case didn’t set legal precedent, but it was a “watershed moment.” “We have an individual who’s engaged in serial violations of NCAA anti-gambling rules, and it would incentivize a run on courthouses across the country to challenge basically any NCAA rule in the rulebook,” Balsam said. The NCAA’s appeal was never resolved. Athletic directors at other prominent sports universities moved to boycott Texas Tech. By mid-June, Sorsby had left the school. He tried to enter professional football, but the National Football League denied him for 2026. We covered much more during the hour and it’s well worth your time to watch the entire thing. In addition, here are a few story ideas for reporting on these topics. Investigate how gambling affects student mental health. One angle to explore is how student-athletes cope with stressors related to the ubiquity of sports betting, such as messages and harassment online and in person from bettors who lose wagers. “What we’re seeing now is the vitriol that athletes experience just because people’s team that they rooted for lost — that was bad enough — but now people are losing money,” Kraft said. Some harassment is directly related to prop bets, which are bets made on whether a specific player will hit or miss a mark — say, run for at least 100 yards in a football game, or score 20 or more points in a basketball game. Because prop bets are linked to the performance of an athlete, rather than the team, they can fuel harassment of individual players. Finding athletes and college students who bet on sports and are willing to talk on the record can take time, Kraft said. “A lot of it is about relationship building, which every reporter knows is not the easiest thing to do, especially in collegiate athletics,” Kraft said. “But the more conversations you have with someone, the more likely they are to be willing to share that story.” And some universities regularly perform surveys and outreach related to student wellness. It’s worth investigating whether those surveys are asking enough about mental health harms related to sports betting among athletes and non-athletes alike — or whether they’re asking about sports betting at all. “Simply having journalists ask questions about that might raise the sensitivity, so that [universities] track the issue more closely,” Balsam said. Cover legislation and regulations on the horizon, especially around prop betting. In 2024, Ohio gaming regulators banned prop bets on college sports. Officials cited links between prop betting and player harassment, and the NCAA had pushed for the ban. Several other states have restricted betting on college sports. Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, South Dakota, Washington and Wisconsin have banned bets on college teams from their states, according to a 2024 report from the National Conference of State Legislatures. The Indiana Gaming Commission will meet in September to consider a ban on prop betting in college sports, according to Andrea Jimenez, a policy specialist with the NCSL. Since the 2024 report, Missouri has passed legislation allowing sports betting, but the state bans prop bets on teams representing in-state colleges and universities. States that to varying degrees ban prop betting on college sports, according to research Jimenez has conducted, include Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Virginia. Check with your state’s gaming commission for current rules and regulations around betting on college sports. If your state doesn’t ban prop bets on college sports, pay close attention to potential legislative or regulatory action around those types of bets. “There will be more restrictions coming, there will be guardrails put in, there will be a kind of a narrowing of the space that gambling entities can be in — and that’s going to come from a legislative body,” Kraft said. Examine how other countries address integrity issues. College sports has not reached a tipping point at which sports betting is seriously threatening the integrity of competition, Balsam and Kraft explained. Most student-athletes are not gambling or involved in bribery schemes, and they play honestly. But, Balsam added, it’s worth looking at regulations and legislation in other countries to understand how U.S. authorities might address integrity-of-the-game concerns. For example, Balsam pointed to legislative efforts in Spain and England to limit advertising from sportsbooks. Research published in the Harm Reduction Journal in 2025 suggests that the Spanish decree reduced the total money gambled, but not the average number of active accounts with online sportsbooks. There are bipartisan efforts at the federal level to limit sportsbook advertising in the U.S. Some states, such as New York and New Jersey, have considered restricting sportsbook ads. The NCAA has hired private firms to monitor integrity concerns. Sports reporters covering gambling on college sports should also know about the Macolin Convention, Balsam said. It’s an international treaty aimed at combating manipulation of sporting contests. Dozens of European nations have signed it, along with Australia and Morrocco. The U.S. has not. Australia also has a regulatory agency whose mandate is to protect sports integrity. In the U.S., finding the regulatory balance between sportsbooks and states that want to maximize revenue — while maintaining integrity and the interest of fans, sponsors and the news media — is going to be “an ongoing calibration,” Balsam said. Expert Commentary