When Kirk Ferentz first said it, he sounded whiny. But given the context of what’s happening—or not happening—in the rest of college sports, his words are worth reconsidering.
“For whatever reason, we’re the lucky ones,” Ferentz said last month. “We’re the chosen ones.”
The Iowa Hawkeyes football coach was referring to the gambling investigation that has consumed the athletic departments at Iowa and Iowa State, a sprawling sting operation by the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation that implicated dozens of athletes in violating NCAA rules and will cost some of them their college careers. Others will be suspended for significant periods of time, up to a full season. In addition to the alleged NCAA violations, criminal charges have been part of the equation for 17 athletes so far (five of them accepted a plea deal Wednesday).
The scandal will tangibly impact the Iowa–Iowa State rivalry football game Saturday. Five prospective Cyclones starters are out of the lineup—including their starting quarterback—and a couple of Hawkeyes have been affected as well. Athletes gambled underage in a state where the law says wagering is illegal for those under 21; used accounts that were in the names of parents, other family members or friends; gambled on teams at their schools; and in some cases placed bets on their own teams—some even wagered against their teams.
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NCAA rules are crystal clear: College athletes cannot bet on sports at any level in which the NCAA sponsors a championship. Penalties have been modified and softened in recent months to introduce a sliding scale based on amounts wagered and on what. But permanent loss of college eligibility or season-long suspensions remain on the books for athletes who wager on their own teams or teams at their schools.
Given what’s at stake, it’s hard to feel too sorry for the guilty parties. They chose to violate well-known NCAA rules and got caught, thanks to the increasingly sophisticated tracking technology that comes along with modern wagering via phone and other electronic sources. And yet, something is amiss here.
Why is this just an Iowa thing and, more narrowly than that, just an Iowa and Iowa State thing? How can it be that these were the only two campuses afflicted with such serious problems, and they just happen to be the two biggest in the same state? Why does it appear to be only targeting athletes at those two schools, as opposed to the general student population? And why did a criminal investigation morph into a de facto NCAA investigation, with Iowa regulators and/or law enforcement officials producing information that doesn’t specifically relate to state laws and regulations? Why are NCAA rules the state of Iowa’s business?
Thus far, concrete answers to those questions have been elusive. (The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation did not respond to a request for comment.) And that’s where and why Ferentz has a point.
Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time, indeed. But what about all the other students on those campuses and other campuses nationwide who are doing the same crimes without being investigated, charged, suspended and punished?
Rest assured, every athletic director in America is watching Iowa’s canary-in-a-coal-mine situation with interest and trepidation. And relief. Because for whatever reason, these investigations haven’t proliferated in other states or at other schools.
“There are thousands of college athletes breaking NCAA gambling rules and thousands of regular students breaking the law,” says one source familiar with the campus wagering space. “They’re just not under investigation.”
This scandal—and the even more tawdry one involving former Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon—comes at the confluence of two trends: the proliferation of legalized sports wagering in America, and the NCAA’s de-emphasis of gambling oversight. Basically, all of college athletics slept on gambling at the very time it was exploding in popularity and accessibility.
Earlier this century, the NCAA had a well-staffed enforcement arm called the Agent, Gambling and Amateurism Activities division. Those staffers were a regular presence on campuses; held annual seminars for NCAA basketball tournament Sweet Sixteen teams; had a website (dontbetonit.org); and encouraged schools to prominently display signage in their athletic facilities about the risks and penalties associated with impermissible wagering.
Over time, many of those AGAA staffers left the NCAA for campus compliance jobs, law firms that specialized in NCAA compliance or jobs outside the industry. The association’s expertise in the gambling sector largely became the province of enforcement rep Mark Strothkamp. He died unexpectedly last December, and there was almost no one minding the store heading into a spring of bombshell gambling headlines.
(Via a spokesperson, the NCAA says it has been consistently vigilant in monitoring and education on wagering issues throughout 2023. The association has partnered with Epic Risk Management to reach more than 20,000 athletes, it says.)
Many universities and their affiliated conferences seem to have been blindsided as well, which suggests a lack of awareness and foresight. With gambling companies buying ads in stadiums, on college sports broadcasts and targeting young consumers, the stimulus was omnipresent. The media has played into it, creating gambling content that once was scrupulously avoided.
(That includes individual prop bets, which are wagers on an individual athlete’s statistics. One compliance consultant relayed a case of a player who wagered on himself to reach a certain threshold of production. He didn’t reach it. At least he wasn’t betting against himself, which would be an attempt to influence the outcome of the competition.)
It’s never been easier or more commonplace to gamble, thanks to phone apps and state legislation (on Thursday Kentucky became the 34th state to activate sports wagering). It’s also never been easier to get caught placing impermissible wagers, thanks to geotracking and operators’ access to bettors’ personal information. Several NFL players have been busted for placing bets from their teams’ facilities, and the same was true for many of the implicated athletes at Iowa and Iowa State, according to sources familiar with the cases.
Against this backdrop, much of the rest of the college sports industry has rushed to put safeguards and educational systems in place. U.S. Integrity, a Las Vegas–based monitoring company, has signed deals to assist more and more conferences in their oversight of wagering compliance. The firm’s CEO, Matthew Holt, is crisscrossing the country speaking on campuses to athletes, coaches and administrators.
Meanwhile, the NCAA and the state of Iowa are still hashing out potential penalties. The criminal punishments likely will not be significant for most involved athletes, but the NCAA sanctions will be steep for many. While those penalties will be appropriate, they also appear to highlight a selective enforcement process by Iowa regulators.
Meanwhile, the rest of the nation’s college athletes, coaches and administrators can only exhale after their schools were not “the chosen ones.” If nothing else, the Cyclones and Hawkeyes might have scared everyone else straight.
