SAN DIEGO - When the NCAA chief legal counsel, a conference commissioner and an athletic director gathered on a panel to talk sports betting's toll on college athletics Thursday, the most striking moment wasn't about point-shaving schemes or harassment of student-athletes. It was the NCAA contradicting itself.
Asked directly where the NCAA stands in terms of prediction markets, NCAA Chief Legal Counsel Scott Bearby told a group at the National Council of Legislators From Gaming States that they are "not having conversations with the prediction market companies." That statement sits awkwardly next to what NCAA Associate Director Mark Hicks told RotoWire last month. Hicks said the NCAA has, in fact, engaged in informal, "get-to-know-you" conversations with prediction market operators, seeking to understand how those platforms approach integrity and enforcement.
Bearby said the NCAA is drafting comments in response to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission's ability to properly police those markets. A memorandum of understanding — similar to the one Major League Baseball struck with the CFTC — may be something the NCAA could consider, Bearby said, but he characterized it "having little substance."
Bearby maintains that direct engagement with the prediction market companies themselves hasn't happened. Perhaps the audience played a role in his comments.
NCLGS serves multiple stakeholders - including state legislators, regulators, and native tribes - all whom see prediction markets as both an economic threat and one to their sovereignty.
Hicks told RotoWire that NCAA was actively probing prediction market operators about how they define and enforce integrity.
Whether it reflects an evolving position, an internal disconnect on messaging, or two officials drawing different lines around what counts as a "conversation," the contradiction underscores how unsettled the NCAA's posture toward this space remains — even as the stakes for college athletes keep rising.
Prediction Markets, Prop Bets Dominate College Concerns
When then governor-and-now-NCAA President Charlie Baker signed the Massachusetts Sports Betting Act into law in 2022, he made sure that the Commonwealth prohibited prop bets on college athletics.
The panelists were in agreement that an end to college props would be beneficial.
"I look at it from a risk analysis, and the prop bet does bring up the highest risk in all of this from where I sit. It's the hardest to detect," said Mid-American Conference Chairman Jon A. Steinbrecher. And when it comes to "the prediction markets, we're telling our student athletes from enforcement of where I sit, that's sports wagering and we're going to treat it as such. So don't get involved in it."
Those stakes were the real subject of the panel. Bearby noted an ongoing criminal investigation touching 17 schools and roughly 40 athletes over prop bet manipulation, and pointed to a college baseball case as evidence that no sport or division is insulated. He estimated prediction markets moved roughly $2 billion around this year's men's and women's March Madness tournaments alone — a volume of unregulated, contract-based betting activity the NCAA has no enforcement mechanism to touch.
Unlike licensed sportsbooks, which can flag anomalous betting patterns to conferences and integrity monitors, prediction markets currently answer to no such framework, since anyone willing to write a contract with another party can wager on a named athlete's performance.
Player props emerged as the panel's shared villain. Mid-American Conference Commissioner Jon Steinbrecher called them the single change he'd make if given the chance to undo one thing in the current betting landscape, arguing they're the hardest form of wagering to detect and the most direct route to pressuring an individual athlete — miss two baskets, and a manipulator has leverage. Morgan State's athletic director framed it as an equity problem as much as an integrity one: athletes at lower-resourced programs, who aren't earning significant NIL money, may be more vulnerable to that kind of approach than stars at flagship programs.
Sorsby Case Remain Open Wound For NCAA
The panel also returned repeatedly to the case of Brendan Sorsby, the former Texas Tech quarterback who was ruled ineligible by the NCAA after it emerged he'd wagered roughly $90,000 on pro and college sports over four years — including 40 bets tied to Indiana football from his time as a freshman quarterback there. A Texas judge granted Sorsby a reprieve allowing him to play this season, aside from a two-game suspension, over the NCAA's objection. Bearby declined to discuss the case by name, but the question that prompted it — whether statutory, uniform standards should govern when an athlete's wagering activity triggers mandatory ineligibility, rather than case-by-case enforcement decided in courtrooms — went unanswered. Bearby noted only that the NCAA already has tiered eligibility consequences tied to wagering on one's own team or sport, and that the recent injunction activity around those rules has "galvanized" membership support for keeping them intact.
What the session made clear is that the NCAA's authority here is largely rhetorical. It can lobby for state-level bans on college prop bets, push federal regulators toward tighter rules, and draft comment letters questioning CFTC jurisdiction — but it holds no formal seat at the table with the prediction market operators reshaping how fans and, increasingly, bad actors interact with college sports. Bearby said as much himself: absent state-level bans, there's little the NCAA can do beyond hoping the same courts now granting injunctions to athletes like Sorsby eventually side with the governing body instead.
