1-on-1 with Charlie Baker
In just a few short years, sports betting has gone from an occasional Vegas detour to a constant presence in American life. A tap away on your phone. A fixture in every commercial break. A storyline woven into every game.
As betting has surged, so have the ripple effects: social media abuse, integrity concerns, pressure on athletes, and an entirely new culture forming around wins, losses, and prop bets. College sports sits at the center of that storm. So I spoke with NCAA President Charlie Baker (no relation) about what he's seeing, what worries him and what comes next.
Let's dive in…
Kendall Baker:Charlie, thanks so much for taking the time. I'd like to begin with some pretty alarming numbers. According to a recent NCAA study, 36% of Division I men's basketball athletes reported experiencing social media abuse related to sports betting within the last year, while 29% reported having interacted with a student on campus who had placed a bet on their team. What are your immediate thoughts when you hear that?
Charlie Baker:
After my appointment was announced in December 2022, I went out and visited about 1,000 student athletes on campuses, mostly in and around New England, which is where I was living. Basically just to sort of say, "tell me what's going on."
So much of those conversations were about sports betting — and especially the abuse and harassment that came with it — that one of the first things we did when I got to the NCAA was a survey of 18 to 22 year olds on sports betting. I wanted to see if what I'd been hearing anecdotally was true; that the peer group of a lot of kids who play college sports were really betting on it in a very significant way.
The answer that came back was that, yeah, a ton of people between the ages of 18 and 22 — never mind the grown ups — were betting on college sports. And these are the kids that student athletes are interacting with, going to class with, eating in the cafeteria with and all the rest.
When I was in college, it would have been a very weird day if we had a game coming up and I didn't have classmates and friends asking me, "How's it gonna go tonight?" But that was just chatter. Now, it's guidance and inside information, and I think that creates a completely different dynamic for athletes, especially those playing at a big-time level.
"The phone changed everything"
KB:Legalized sports betting is an issue you dealt with as the Governor of Massachusetts, and now it's something you're navigating as president of the NCAA. So I'm just curious how you, personally, think about sports betting and the cultural impact it's having?
When I was governor and this issue was first being debated and discussed, which probably goes back to 2018 or so, most people thought this was going to be casino-type stuff. That you would go somewhere and bet on sports. Because everybody had always gone to Vegas to bet on sports.
I don't think anybody was anticipating that it would be as ubiquitous as it became when DraftKings and FanDuel, in particular, created phone-based opportunities for people to bet on pretty much anything. You think about parlays, that's something that was really hard to do without technology and almost simultaneous betting opportunities.
So there's just so many things about the technology that I think we can't underestimate in the growth and the interest and the access that people have to this stuff. The phone changed everything. People just weren't thinking at that point [in 2018] about how fast this whole thing was going to end up in the palm of your hand.
And look, how many [sports betting] ads do you see when you watch any sort of sporting event now? I mean, this stuff is everywhere. I do believe that when something is illegal, people think twice about it. So you can't underestimate the impact all these commercials have had [in making] sports betting socially acceptable.
The problem with prop bets
Prop bets have been at the center of this year's biggest scandals (see: Jontay Porter and Terry Rozier in the NBA, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz in MLB), and it's not hard to see why. Unlike wagers tied to team outcomes, these bets hinge on a single player doing a specific thing, whether that's scoring fewer than 10 points or throwing a ball instead of a strike. That makes them easier to manipulate and easier to approach athletes about.
KB:Why do prop bets pose such a unique threat? And how much of the betting-related harassment stems from these specific types of wagers?
Well, it's definitely where most of the really aggressive harassment directed at kids is coming from. And the second thing is the pressure that the underperforming prop bets puts on young people. I don't think that's something that's fully understood.
I mean, if you talk to athletes who play for programs where there are regularly betting lines on a lot of what happens in their games… they've got classmates, school employees, friends they had in high school, and all kinds of people putting all this social pressure on them.
They're saying, "Look, I don't want you to lose the game, but just don't score more than 20 points. Miss your first shot. Don't hit your first free throw. Don't catch your first pass." It sounds so easy to the person who's trying to get the kid to do this, and it's just relentless the pressure.
It's like, "Hey, I'm not asking you to do something awful or terrible. I'm not asking you to throw the game," right? But what you are asking them to do is not play the game the way they would choose to play it if their goal was to be a good teammate and win.
I hate the fact that we've caught a whole bunch of young people engaging in this stuff, which just sucks for everybody. But our message has been, ya know, "If you do this, we will catch you." We run a really big integrity monitoring program, probably the biggest in the world. I'm not sure people appreciate that. Over 2.75 million athletes covered over the last five years.
KB:Do you think we could see a nationwide ban on prop bets? There seems to be some momentum around it at the state level as more people realize the danger prop bets pose to the integrity of the games — and to athletes.
We did manage to get a bunch of states to change their rules on this, which I thought was good. And we're now to the point where even the sportsbooks themselves have acknowledged that [prop bets] are a problem because they've changed their rules around NBA and MLB games.
The big challenge with this is always going to be the fact that, for the most part, it's regulated at the state level. The Senate had a hearing last year, and a couple of them were like, "Hmm, there is some interstate commerce stuff here that we should probably be paying attention to." But for the most part, they definitely see this more as a state issue. And frankly, I think a lot of the states probably would rather have it as a state issue.
Protecting college athletes
KB:The NCAA is obviously not the only sports organization navigating the realities of legal sports betting. That said, do you feel a unique responsibility to protect your athletes given how much more vulnerable they are than, say, professional athletes?
For sure. There's a big difference between being a professional athlete with a lot of structure and a lot of advisors around you, and being a kid who eats in a dining hall. And studies in a library. And goes to class with their classmates. And is so much more gettable with respect to practically anything around this. So yeah, for sure, [we feel an added responsibility].
And let's also talk about scale here, okay? I mean, there are 32 NFL teams, 30 MLB teams, 30 NBA teams, 32 NHL teams. I mean, that's not even like a conference in collegiate sports when you think about all the teams. We've got football, we've got men's and women's basketball, volleyball, baseball, ice hockey — we have so many sports that are pretty high visibility.
Prediction markets: The next frontier
Just as sports betting has settled into the mainstream, a new, largely unregulated ecosystem is rising alongside it: prediction markets. They look like betting, act like betting, and operate in similar spaces — but without the rules, transparency, or accountability that states require from sportsbooks. That vacuum worries Baker, who sees prediction markets as the next major flashpoint in the gambling world.
Prediction markets are not regulated at all. And so, ya know, California, which currently doesn't permit sports betting, the prediction markets could have an absolute ball taking that space over.
You see DraftKings and FanDuel dropping out of the American Gaming Association… I'd be willing to conclude that a big part of their reasoning is they're going to get into the prediction market space. They can't afford to let those folks dominate all that green space they can't currently access.
It just says this whole thing is going to get worse unless somebody does something about it. And solving it at the federal level is going to be really challenging because it's still new and not fully formed. So, I mean, you're basically talking about no rules, no oversight, no nothing. And that just feels catastrophic to me. Not just for us, but for everybody.
