When Tom McMillen attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1974, one major sporting event drew attention on campus: The Boat Race, the annual rowing competition between Oxford and its bitter rival Cambridge on the River Thames in London.
While there was betting on the rowing competition first held in 1829, McMillen – an All-American basketball player at the University of Maryland who played in the NBA for 11 years before serving four terms in Congress representing Maryland – remembers few, if any, other opportunities for student wagering.
“That was it,” says McMillen, President and CEO of the LEAD1 Association, which represents 130 Football Bowl Subdivision athletic directors and programs.
“Now, there’s just no universality of betting on campuses anywhere in the world except in the United States. And it’s a potent mix, mixing higher education and sports betting on campuses, and being driven, like so many of these arms races, by money.”
This weekend’s NCAA Men’s Division 1 Tournament Final Four in New Orleans, featuring Duke, North Carolina, Kansas, and Villanova, will again draw interest from bettors on and off college campuses. Before the tournament began, the American Gaming Association estimated that $3.1 billion would be wagered over the three weeks of the tournament. While estimated betting totals for the NCAA Women’s Division 1 Tournament aren’t readily available, operators, notably DraftKings and FanDuel, have increased betting opportunities for the women’s tournament games.
As more money is wagered and more jurisdictions legalize sports betting, McMillen thinks the risk of student-athletes being compromised by gambling interests becomes more probable.
“There’s an inevitability to it,” he says. “I do think there’s a much higher risk of it (happening in) colleges than in the pros.”
One of the missions of Lead1 is to help athletic departments navigate the new opportunities – and possible issues – posed by the legalization of sports betting. Four universities – Michigan State, LSU, Colorado, and McMillen’s alma mater, Maryland — have partnership deals with sports betting companies.
McMillen foresees more universities eventually striking similar deals.
“If it’s a goldmine for one school, the arms race kind of drives other schools to do it,” he says. “. . . You’ll have regional resistance in some areas. Certain areas of the South might be reluctant to jump into sports betting. Although look at LSU (which has a deal with Caesars Sportsbook) and Mississippi (which legalized sports betting on casino properties in 2018). I think you’ll have regional variations. But it’s inevitable that (sports betting) will have a much bigger presence across our universities.”
Noting that sports betting can increase fan engagement in addition to being lucrative for athletic departments when partnership deals are struck, McMillen says it behooves institutions to be aware of possible pitfalls.
“I think there’s enormous risk for those who are running these programs,” he says. “I can tell you the ADs (athletic directors) are concerned about it.”
The complex issues surrounding sports betting are in addition to the burgeoning growth of Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) deals. NIL deals for the most elite and recognizable student-athletes can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Lead1 attempts to help athletic departments address these issues that affect student-athletes on and off playing fields.
“There are just a lot of things hitting the transom for these ADs during this period,” McMillen says.
At the University of Pittsburgh, associate athletic director for compliance Ryan Mitchell acknowledges that the growth and interest in sports betting needs to be monitored on campus.
“To that end, in addition to regular student-athlete and staff education on NCAA legislation covering sports betting, Pitt Athletics contracts with a leading sports integrity solutions company, U.S. Integrity, which provides an individualized integrity monitoring program,” Mitchell said via email. “Pitt Athletics Compliance and General Counsel staff members regularly meet with U.S. Integrity to cover industry-wide or Pitt-specific issues. These can be in the form of seasonal reviews or unique analysis.”
McMillen says LEAD1 stresses the value of educating student-athletes about sports betting. He also thinks jurisdictions and sports betting operators should pitch in to help universities provide support.
“I also think it would be really helpful if we had a national law (addressing sports betting) as opposed to having all these 50 different state laws,” McMillen says. “I think we need a national law that understands the really important part of higher education. America is the only nation in the world that will have universal sports betting associated with those universities. There’s not another nation in the world that has that. And that’s serious business.
“I think it’s important that the federal government take a look at this, quite frankly.”
