NCAA President Charlie Baker said he hopes to “dramatically limit” prop betting at the collegiate level and beyond, warning about how the sports betting practice has changed the “character and the culture of fandom,” and demeaned student athletes.
“Go sit in the stands behind the bench at a big time college basketball game, and just listen to some of this stuff that’s being directed at the kids who are part of those teams,” Baker said in an interview for “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.” The interview was taped on July 1 and aired Sunday.
A proposition, or “prop,” bet involves placing a wager on an individual player or event that isn’t necessarily tied to the final outcome of the game. A bet could involve the number of passing yards or points scored by an individual player during a game, or a wager on a team, like which team will score first.
But Baker said student athletes likely have classmates, friends and family members “on a pretty regular basis,” asking, “‘don’t take the first pitch, don’t take the first shot, don’t catch the first pass. I don’t want you to lose the game, but here’s all the other things I want you to do, so that I can make money.'”
“Honestly, it’s disgraceful, it’s demeaning, and it’s incredibly demoralizing for student athletes,” Baker said. “And I think we’re starting to win this discussion and this debate with the public, and I’m anxious to have a lot of the folks who are part of our community get deeply involved and organized on this one.”
Baker, who served as governor of Massachusetts from 2015 until 2023, said the NCAA was the first to “really raise the alarm about prop bets.”
“I started talking about that pretty much as soon as I got the job in the spring of ’23 because I heard about it a lot from student athletes, who said the noise and the abuse that they were taking from betters around prop bets was really disturbing,” Baker said.
A 2024 NCAA report on online abuse in its championships found nearly 750 instances of sports betting-related abuse and match-fixing allegations, accounting for 12% of all the abuse identified. And a 2025 study found that within the previous year, 36% of Division I men’s basketball student athletes reported experiencing abuse on social media related to sports betting.
The NCAA began a campaign in 2023 to advocate for increasing regulations on sports betting to protect student athletes, after a slew of state laws have legalized the practice in recent years. Earlier this year, Baker called on state gambling commissions to strengthen regulations to eliminate gambling on individual prop bets, after encouraging the regulatory body that oversees prediction markets to suspend the markets until new regulations can be imposed.
Asked by CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe what the NCAA can do to ensure that student athletes aren’t betting on games, Baker said the NCAA runs “the largest integrity program in the world” where they “catch, unfortunately, a lot of young people betting on sports.”
Baker noted that the NCAA runs a surveillance program at all major championships, where they track “all the traffic on social media and notify the authorities about the stuff we think is particularly bad when it comes to coaches, players, or officials to get those people Xed off the platforms for the rest of the tournament.”
He added that, in many cases, they’ve had to notify local authorities “about particularly aggressive abuse that’s been directed at student athletes.”
The prop betting discourse has also made its way to the professional leagues. Last year, the MLB said it was weighing banning all prop betting, while it has put in place some specific restrictions, and the NFL has also attempted to crack down on some elements of the practice.
Baker said he’s been “really pleased” to see professional leagues “start to step up and say, ‘this prop betting stuff is bad news, it’s bad news for our players, it’s bad news for their families.'”
“And my hope is that we, working together with our colleagues and the professional leagues, can dramatically limit, significantly reduce, and in my mind, at least at the collegiate level, get rid of all of the negative prop bets, and hopefully most of the prop bets,” he said.
