SECAUCUS, NJ – January’s NFC Championship game was barely over before conspiracy theorists began screaming.
The New Orleans Saints and Los Angeles Rams were tied with less than 2 minutes left in the game when officials failed to throw a pass-interference flag for an illegal hit so blatant the defender later admitted he was guilty. Instead of the Saints being set up to run down the clock and kick a game-winning chip-shot field goal, they lost in overtime.
Despite the fury of Saints fans and suspicions that four of the seven game officials were reluctant to call a penalty because they live in Southern California, sports-betting experts contend that their data can prove a game was not fixed, just as it can indicate a problem.
Quinton Singleton
“A lot of the analysis is not just ‘is there something?’ It’s ‘is there nothing?” said Quinton Singleton, chief operating officer of Bet.Works, which provides sports book technology throughout North America. He spoke Thursday at a panel discussion titled “Integrity – How A Regulated Sports Betting Sector Guards Against Corruption” at the Betting on Sports America conference at the Meadowlands Exposition Center.
Panelist Matthew Holt, president of U.S. Integrity, a Las Vegas company that provides sports protection services to leagues, college conferences, and sports books throughout the country, said his work also involves showing that a match was on the up and up.
“We look at the betting data, look at the marketing activity and say what happened. (If) this game wasn’t fixed, here’s why the data says it wasn’t,” Holt said.
Also on Thursday’s panel were Thomas B. Shepherd III, partner in Jones Walker law firm, which has the largest gaming law practice in the Southeast; and Becky Harris, former Nevada Gaming Control Board chairwoman who now is an academic fellow with an emphasis on the study of sports betting at the International Center for Gaming Regulation at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Daniel Wallach, founder of Wallach Legal LLC, a Florida firm that works exclusively on sports betting and gaming law, moderated.
No fans of federal oversight
Becky Harris
The four panelists agreed that operators must share betting data with regulators and leagues, but they bristled at Wallach’s questions about establishing a federal sports-betting agency akin to those regulating financial trading.
They said sports book operators, state regulators and leagues already share information necessary to maintain integrity.
“It all starts with data – being able to have that transparency of what’s being wagered, who’s making the bets, where bets are coming from,” Holt said.
Harris listed several college point-shaving scandals that Nevada sports books have helped expose by recognizing unusual betting patterns.
“That’s what you get with a legal, regulated market: the ability for smart people who know odds, who understand sports betting to say ‘hey, there’s a problem here,’” she said.
Shepherd cited a 2016 NCAA study showing that 3.4 percent of Division I men’s basketball players and 2.2 percent of Division I football players reported being asked to share inside information. Among the football players, 1.6 percent reported being asked to influence the outcome of game; that compares with 0.6 percent of men’s basketball players.
The study is done every four years, and percentages were down from or even with results in 2012.
Integrity protectors
Harris noted that the Sports Wagering Integrity Monitoring Association, or SWIMA, announced last week that it is beginning operations. The nonprofit, voluntary group, which includes most major sports betting operators in the United States, aims to discourage illegal or unethical sports-betting activity throughout the country.
Singleton said a voluntary organization such as SWIMA or private companies such as Holt’s U.S. Integrity are preferable to a federal mandate. Harris and Shepherd said a federal organization would mean an additional tax that would raise costs for sports books, which already operate on a thin margin.
Singleton said states already require sports book operators to report suspicious activity.
“More often than not, licensees report more things than regulators want,” he said. “I’m not going to say it’s a perfect system, but we do have an obligation to report and we do it all the time.”
Shepherd said states deal with companies that operate across the country and around the world, so reports of suspicious betting activity are shared widely.
“It’s important to recognize that the states are not silos,” he said.
Holt said that in addition to identifying cases of releasing insider information or affecting game outcomes, maintaining sports integrity also means “being an advocate for people on the other of those false positives.”
“Everybody knows crazy things happen in sports,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that when you lost a game, the game was fixed.
“The New Orleans game wasn’t fixed (just) because the ref blew a call.”
