Why are so many athletes getting caught betting? Because the system is working
From global position to real-time wagering data, sports wagering has never been more monitored.
Anytime anyone — NFL Pro or Average Joe — logs into a sports betting app, his location is immediately available on a dashboard for integrity analysts to view.
How pinpoint is the placement?
“A 3-foot radius,” said Matt Holt, founder and CEO of U.S. Integrity, which has partnered with nearly every major sports organization and sports book in North America to monitor for any irregularities up to and including fraud, point-shaving or game-fixing.
Essentially, they don’t just know who you are but where you are. It means if an athlete logs in while at a team facility — which the NFL prohibits even if they are betting on another sport — they will be almost instantly caught.
Or if, say, a referee uses a friend’s account to log in from the pregame dressing room, questions arise because the friend isn’t a ref and thus wouldn’t be in that locker room.
Global positioning is just one of myriad tools US Integrity and other companies have at their disposal these days. There is real-time wagering data and trends. There are advanced analytic programs that can instantly detect even the slightest variation from the norm, both in the aggregate and the individual. There are intense social media monitoring systems.
“Anything of a nefarious, suspicious or unexpected activity, we send out an alert,” Holt said. “We are catching people at a higher percentage than anytime in the history of sports wagering in North America.”
The headlines are proving that.
The NFL suspended five players earlier this spring for between six games and an entire season. In the shorter-suspension cases, global position proved they had wagered on non-NFL games at the team facility.
College baseball saw Alabama’s head coach fired and Cincinnati’s step down in a scandal that began because unexpected betting occurred in Ohio on an SEC baseball game played in Louisiana.
And just this week, Indianapolis Colts cornerback Isaiah Rodgers acknowledged he had “made mistakes” and was under investigation by the NFL for sports wagering. Per ESPN, it was discovered as many as 100 bets — mostly between $25 and $50 — were placed on NFL games, including the Colts, through the account of an acquaintance.
That’s how dialed in the monitoring industry is.
For decades the legal sportsbook operators in Nevada would roll their eyes when listening to the NFL or the NCAA talk about protecting the integrity of their games against sports wagering. If they want the games to be clean, the casinos would argue, then legalize it, because about the only defense against point-shaving or game-fixing was the monitoring that Vegas could provide, even if it was extremely primitive at the time.
After all, no one was more interested in a clean game than the people taking the bets.
Well, five years ago the Supreme Court ruled that the legality of sports wagering should be left to the individual states. So far 33, plus the District of Columbia, have jumped in. Sensing a profit, every sports organization in the country has linked up with sportsbooks.
After a rush to make wagering legal, states, books and leagues have now begun to focus on monitoring and detection. As more laws and data come in, the system becomes increasingly effective.
“The reason it’s all happening now is not because athletes are betting more today than two years ago," Holt said. "It’s because state gaming commissions are focused on this.”
Essentially, when an athlete, coach, ref or official gets nabbed, it’s not that legalized sports wagering is causing the scandal, it’s that it is allowing the scandal to be detected.
In Vegas, you can still hear old-timers talk with pride about how sportsbooks busted a point-shaving ring involving the 1994 Arizona State basketball team led by guard Stevin “Hedake” Smith. Yet due to limited detection tools, it wasn't discovered until the fourth game of the scheme.
Holt said if it occurred in 2023, it would be immediate.
“That it lasted four games would have been an embarrassment today,” Holt said. “The transparency we have today means we can do light years more than even 10 or 15 years ago.”
No one is willing to say nothing untoward is happening out there. Anything is possible.
However, the power of the advanced monitoring systems is clear in the scope (from the NFL to a random Iowa State athlete) and how minor the mistakes are (betting in the wrong location). Nothing has come even close to point-shaving or game-throwing.
Holt says the system will get only stronger. There are tools that aren’t public and as more places make wagering legal (four more states are coming) the amount of data that aids detection will only increase and the amount bet with organized crime or unregulated offshore entities will decrease.
US Integrity, for example, is currently adding encryptions that will prevent anyone who isn't allowed to wager — athletes, coaches and refs — from wagering in the first place, thus snuffing out some of the trouble before it even occurs.
“What I got from the whole situation,” Colts linebacker E.J. Speed told reporters this week after an NFL education session, “is don’t gamble.”
Speed is smart. Anyone who might be tempted to even bet at all, let alone try to influence the action, should know that they are unlikely to beat the already significant and ever-evolving monitoring community.
Try it and you’ll likely — if not absolutely — get caught.
And when they do, it’s not a sign of legalized sports wagering being a problem, but legalized sports wagering actually being the solution.
