The Coming “Spot-Fixing” Threat

Match-fixing is difficult and expensive, even in an individual sport. The enticement—or threat—needs to be so great that the athlete will cast aside everything he’s ever known and believed about himself and about sport in order to do the one thing he has dedicated his life to avoiding: losing.

Spot-fixing is much easier, logistically and financially, for the criminal behind the scheme and easier for an athlete to justify. Instead of rigging an entire match, spot-fixing rigs the outcomes of prop bets: discrete, seemingly insignificant parts of a game. A double fault to open a tennis player’s first service game of the second set. A wild pitch on a 3-0 count in softball. Two foot faults by the same player while serving in a volleyball match.

College sports are a spot-fixer’s dream. College sports are a spot-fixer’s dream. There’s a seemingly infinite number of competitions across all sports and levels, played by athletes from all socioeconomic backgrounds—the overwhelming majority of whom get no financial benefit from playing.

Prop bets are a significant trigger for such abuse. The NCAA’s gambling-education programs focus on harm reduction. “Harm-reduction strategies acknowledge actual behaviors (e.g., some student-athletes do bet on sports) and attempt to meet individuals where they are.” For both gambling and other proscribed behaviors, the NCAA believes harm-reduction strategies are “particularly useful when prohibitions and/or penalties have proven ineffective.” As such, the first domain of harm reduction addresses problem gambling and gambling addiction.

The second gambling-related harm is online abuse from sports bettors who go after players whom the bettors blame for the loss of a wager.

Prop bets are a significant trigger for such abuse. An athlete (hopefully) does not know how much money is riding on her free throws or on whether, as a goalkeeper, she concedes fewer than two goals in today’s game. The message “You cost me $200” or, more threateningly, “You owe me $200” in a stream of social-media invective (with, perhaps, some personal information) could degrade an athlete’s mental health and performance.

Right there we see multiple enticements to spot-fix. Even absent such abuse, the obvious one is cash in hand: Get paid for doing something simple and nondescript. Or the fixer could present the money as compensation for the abuse: “People will be mad no matter what you do. At least now you’ll get something for your trouble.” One level deeper, the fixer could lead or orchestrate the abuse to soften up the athlete—to groom him or her—before offering to either stop the abuse or, again, to make it worthwhile.

Collegiate athletes, coaches, and staff members seem unprepared for these scenarios. An e-learning module mentions spot-fixing as one of four risks to competitive integrity. “What should you do if … ?” is otherwise largely missing from sports-gambling education and risk mitigation.

Sean McKeever is a professor of philosophy at Davidson College. He has been teaching a course on sports philosophy for the last six years. Sport is his vehicle for “stealth philosophy,” particularly in his specialty of ethics. “The ethical cultures of our teams and sports, and the ethics of individuals involved, are going to be tested. It’s a challenging environment.”

One-quarter of Davidson’s 2,000 students are Division I athletes, and 80 percent participate in some level of organized school athletics, from NCAA competition to intercollegiate clubs to intramurals. Given those numbers and his course offerings, McKeever has come to know many student-athletes.

“There’s always drama, but they are very loyal to their teammates and the team. They will miss my class before they will miss practice, even if they are injured and all they can do is sit on the bench, bring water, and encourage their teammates.”

The mentality and the ethos of someone who plays in the NCAA is antithetical to any sort of competitive fixing. McKeever says these are “hooks” for athletics departments and coaches to defend against the temptations and risks of corruption.

“If people feel like others are acting wrongly or would be willing to act wrongly, then they are more likely to act wrongly themselves.” “When people get tempted to do things that are unethical, they ask themselves: what are other people doing? If people feel like others are acting wrongly or would be willing to act wrongly, then they are more likely to act wrongly themselves. Bring that discussion to the surface to enable student-athletes to reassure one another: ‘I wouldn’t do this, and I expect you wouldn’t do this. If you did, your teammates will never look at you the same way again.’”

Even seemingly insignificant prop bets should offend an athlete.

Even seemingly insignificant prop bets should offend an athlete. “That’s not how athletes naturally think. They attach a lot of importance to performing to the best of their abilities. When a basketball player misses a shot, they don’t say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ They think: ‘You’re not going to make every shot. I’m not going to get down on myself. I did my best. Now I’ll go back to practice.’”

McKeever thinks these connections should be explicit in student-athlete gambling education.

There’s a bit of irony that the philosophy professor is offering locker-room-level tips for coaches and athletes, while the athletic institutions are handling these issues at the 30,000-foot level.

The added bit of real-world practicality in McKeever’s approach is that the student-athletes are the only potential participants in a spot-fixing scheme whom universities and the NCAA can definitely reach.

Take the National Basketball Association (NBA), for example.

The NBA currently has three players under federal investigation—one of whom already plead guilty to conspiracy—for spot-fixing. According to ESPN, the league “asked partner sportsbooks to halt wagering” on particular bets for particular players and may be implementing more regulations on prop bets. These companies, though, carry a fraction of the global betting volume on NBA games and American sports as a whole. Moreover, game data is scrutinized in real-time by gambling-integrity monitoring companies, the teams’ and league’s sports scientists, broadcasters, and armchair stats junkies.

The Players Association is likely correct in believing that “there is no evidence of widespread manipulation,” because the NBA is a hard target.

Meanwhile, corrupted wagers are not going to be on mainstream sportsbooks that share the NCAA’s incentives for honest competition. They’re going to be on offshore books with minimal regulation and high liquidity—outside the scope and reach of the NCAA.

In 2018, six months after the Supreme Court ruling that opened the door for legal sports betting, investigative journalist and sports-corruption expert Declan Hill testified to the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe: The “clear and present danger to U.S. sports … will not come to the major leagues.”

Note that he said “major” and not “professional.” We can safely include Power Five football and basketball amongst the majors. But those programs comprise less than two percent of the more than 500,000 student-athletes in the NCAA.

“Over 90 percent of U.S. athletes [are] in grave danger [from] this phenomenon. Tier two and tier three NCAA are under that same clear and present danger,” Hill said. “I’m not saying that it’s going to happen now. I’m not saying that it’s going to happen in the next year, two, three years. But it will inevitably come.”

It’s been seven years. This summer, Hill told the Wall Street Journal: “Spot-fixing is the easiest form of corruption ever invented. One desperate athlete can pull it off—and they frequently do.”

The UNC Policy Manual requires school chancellors to “ensure that formal awareness programs” are implemented. If a professional basketball or baseball player can be sufficiently desperate, McKeever sees difficult times ahead for collegiate sports. Legalized sports gambling in the U.S. has emerged over the same years and at a similar clip as collegiate athletes’ opportunities to sign NIL deals, receive pseudo-salaries via boosters, and make liberal use of the transfer portal between schools.

“I don’t know how you maintain the locker room culture amongst student-athletes when one athlete is making six figures on an NIL deal and an athlete down the bench is struggling to buy textbooks.

One athletics director replied only to decline comment; one school asked me to clarify my question. “One thing that has led people to get involved with sports gambling is that sort of inequality. That’s not a justification—it’s a very human thought and it’s one that people have.”

The UNC Policy Manual requires school chancellors to “ensure that formal awareness programs on the dangers of gambling in athletics are implemented.”

The NCAA and several athletic conferences have partnered with EPIC Global Solutions to provide gambling education to student-athletes. Through its partnership with the Atlantic Coast Conference, EPIC has delivered presentations to the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State University.

I reached out to over three dozen athletic-department staff, faculty members, and coaches from 12 schools across the UNC System, asking how they and their departments are preparing athletes for the risks and enticements of spot-fixing.

UNC Asheville said that their “internal team works collaboratively to educate student-athletes about gambling-related risks, including mental health issues, through department-wide speakers and educational modules.” If a UNCA student athlete has a gambling-related concern, he or she can submit it through the department’s Real Response platform, which was set up “to anonymously report issues surrounding mental health, social injustice, COVID-19 policy infractions, misconduct, hazing, sexual harassment and more.” In-person reports should go to the assistant athletic director for compliance or to the athletic director.

No other school provided any information. One athletics director replied only to decline comment; one school asked me to clarify my question; one faculty athletics representative, who is in the sports-management department, said, “This is beyond my area of expertise.”

That does not speak well for the level of preparedness at UNC schools and, by extension, among their student-athletes.

George M. Perry is a sports performance coach, sports businessman, and writer. Before going into the sports industry, he was a submarine warfare officer in the United States Navy and briefly attended law school.