Insight on the News: All Bets Off - college sports, gambling

Will a proposed federal ban on college-sports gambling be enough to stymie scandal?

With the ball on the 1-yard line in the third quarter of a 1994 college-football game between the Northwestern Wildcats and the Iowa Hawkeyes, Wildcats running-back Dennis Lundy took a clean handoff and barreled toward a touchdown -- only to fumble a foot from the end zone. A lousy break for a lousy Northwestern team? Not exactly. As Lundy later would tell a federal judge, he fumbled on purpose, the better to cover a $400 bet he had made against his own team.

Lundy won his bet, but Northwestern lost big time as the fumble led to the exposure of an extensive gambling scandal, one that touched two sports and several student-athletes, sullying the school's image. With scandals such as this in mind, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is pushing two bills that would outlaw amateur-sports gambling, now legal only in Nevada. Supporters of the legislation, including the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and many prominent coaches, contend betting on college athletics is an unseemly practice that threatens the integrity of competition.

"Gambling on kids and teen-agers is just wrong," says Doris Dixon, the NCAKs director of federal relations. "And if you're betting on the games, there's always a chance that somebody's going to try and fix them."

Opponents of a federal ban argue that such a measure is wholly cosmetic, a nonsolution that will punish Nevada unduly while doing nothing to address the pervasive problem of illegal sports gambling on campuses -- not to mention game-fixing. "Doing away with Nevada sports books is not going to impact scandals," says Frank Fahrenkopf, president of the American Gaming Association, a gambling industry lobbying group. "Who's more of a threat to athletes -- a Los Angeles businessman who flies over to Las Vegas and bets $50, or a bunch of guys at a campus tailgate party who know the players and are illegally betting hundreds of dollars? I don't think it's the guy in Nevada."

Sponsored by McCain and Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., in the Senate and Reps. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Tim Roemer, D-Ind., in the House, the proposed antigambling bills would close what is known as the "Las Vegas loophole" in a 1992 federal law that banned betting on amateur sports in every state except Nevada. In Nevada, where sports gambling is a $2.3 billion-a-year industry, a discriminating gambler can bet on the total points in a game, the halftime score, even the most points scored by an individual.

One of the most popular forms of wagering is on the point spread, or the margin by which a particular team is favored to win or lose. That's what former Notre Dame kicker Kevin Pendergast bet on in 1995, when he traveled to Las Vegas and placed a $20,150 wager at Caesar's Palace that the Northwestern men's basketball team would lose a game against Michigan by at least 25-and-a-half points.

Why make such a large bet on such long odds? Pendergast had arranged to pay two Northwestern players -- starters Dewey Williams and Dion Lee -- thousands of dollars to keep the Wildcats' score down. It was a classic case of point-shaving, one for which all three participants were sent to prison.

"Did legalized gambling force Kevin to do this? Absolutely not" said South Carolina head football coach Lou Holtz, who coached Pendergast at Notre Dame. "However, I believe that the choice and the opportunity to cheat a system and make some easy money was very enticing."

Holtz made his remarks at a June hearing on Capitol Hill, where he and Kentucky head basketball coach Tubby Smith told Congress that all forms of college gambling place their sports at risk. Dozens of other coaches agree, as does the National Gambling Impact Study Commission (NGISC), a congressional branch created in 1997 to examine the social consequences of wagering. "Gambling poses a grave threat to the integrity of college sports," NGISC member James Dobson told Congress in March.

Just how grave? The 1990s were home to a half-dozen high-profile student-athlete gambling scandals. Although relevant statistics are scarce, a 1999 University of Michigan survey of male college athletes found that almost half have bet on college sports, with one in 20 admitting to wagering on their own games, shaving points or providing inside information to gamblers.

Then there are the referees. According to Smith, a second Michigan survey of officials found that 84 percent have bet on games during their careers, with more than 20 percent doing so on the NCAA tournament. Worse still, two officials admitted their knowledge of the point spread affected the way they called a game.

Proponents of a betting ban say that legal college-sports betting encourages illegal betting, particularly by students. According to Dixon, Nevada sends a mixed message to the rest of the nation. "It would be like exempting Florida from heroin laws, or Texas from cocaine," said Smith. "The student groups that advise us say, `We sort of know [college-sports gambling] is illegal, but the point spreads are in the newspaper. So we figure it can't be that bad.'"

In fact, the NCAA and many coaches say that point spreads, some of which come from Nevada, are the most corrosive aspect of legalized college-sports gambling. By rewarding margin of victory instead of wins and losses, point spreads encourage forms of game-rigging that are far more subtle than the outright fix. That dropped touchdown pass? Those missed free throws? That lackluster effort on defense? All could be accidental, or all could be intentional. During the 1996-97 season, the Fresno State men's basketball team covered the point spread in just eight of 30 games, triggering a federal grand-jury investigation that continues to this day.

Smith and Holtz worry that knowledge of the point spread may skewer coaching strategies, too. "I have witnessed our football players be idolized, praised and cheered after a win," Holtz said in June. "I have also witnessed them being ridiculed, demonized and ostracized after a win. The only difference was, in one case we covered the point spread and in the other we didn't."

Is it all Nevada's fault? The American Gaming Association's Fahrenkopf doesn't think so. "Nevada's an easy target," he says. "But if we were really part of the problem, there'd be a lot more money being bet here." Gamblers last year wagered roughly $800 million in Nevada on college teams; by comparison, the FBI estimated bettors dropped $2.5 billion illegally on the 1995 NCAA men's basketball tournament alone.

Disturbingly, much of that illegal action is taking place on college campuses. "The issue is not whether people are gambling in Las Vegas," says Arnie Wexler, a former compulsive gambler and leading counselor on the subject, who estimates that 1.5 million minors nationwide are addicted to gambling. "The issue is the explosion of compulsive gambling on every campus in America. It's easier to place a bet on a campus today than it is to buy a pack of cigarettes or a can of beer. If you can't find a bookmaker in half an hour, something's wrong with you. It's huge. And sports betting is the number one issue."

On campus, the potential for malfeasance is obvious: Suppose an athlete runs up a gambling debt with a campus bookmaker, then turns to game-rigging as a way of paying it off. That's roughly what happened at Northwestern. "Pendergast was in trouble with illegal bookies at Notre Dame and in Illinois long before he went to Nevada," Fahrenkopf note "And it wasn't until he went there that he got nailed. If someone's fixing a bet, it's the Nevada books who lose money. They're the victims."

Sure enough, gambling officials in Nevada keep a close eye on betting patterns and fluctuations in the point spreads for the express purpose of catching cheats. "We have the strictest gaming regulation in the world," says Oscar Goodman, mayor of Las Vegas. "But for the Nevada gaming board, many of these fixers would have never been caught. If you ban the betting, you lose the benefit of the regulators. Fixers will be crawling out of holes to get at these kids."

When it comes to the legislative battle over the antibetting bill, gambling interests have put their money where their mouth is. During the last decade, the gambling industry has become one of the most powerful lobbies on Capitol Hill. Political donations from gambling interests to both the Democratic and Republican parties increased from $2.3 million in 1993-94 to more than $5.6 million in 1997-98, according to Common Cause, a campaign-finance reform group. During the current election cycle, gambling interests have contributed almost $5 million in soft money to both parties through July of this year, according to Federal Election Commission data collected by the Campaign Study Group, a nonpartisan campaign-finance research firm.

What has all that money bought? Time. While antibetting bills in both houses of Congress have cleared the appropriate committees, neither has been scheduled for a floor vote. And, according to Graham, the reason is obvious. "Our problem is that the leadership in both parties doesn't want to run afoul of these guys in terms of their political giving," he says. "They lavish both parties with money. This is a classic example of campaign giving holding up legislation that has a lot of bipartisan support."

Even Fahrenkopf concedes that if the antigambling bills come up for congressional vote, they will pass by a healthy margin. No one outside of Nevada with an interest in re-election wants to be seen as endorsing "gambling on kids." And that raises the question: Just how much of a difference will a college-sports betting ban really make? The answer: More than its opponents will admit -- and less than its proponents would like.

Without legal sports books, big-money bettors -- presumably the kind most likely to fix a game -- could find themselves out of the action. According to Bill Saum, head of the NCAA's gambling office, small-time and campus bookies seldom accept extremely large wagers. "In the Arizona State case, they bet $1 million, which would be virtually impossible to lay down illegally," he says. "You'd need many, many bookies in cities across the country. And they talk to each other, so they'd probably stop taking your bets."

In addition, those bookies no longer would be able to "layoff" bets in Nevada. Currently, when a bookie has a lot of illegal money on one side of a wager, he can eliminate the odds of a big pay-out by legally betting on the other side. (Bookies, who make money from a small commission on each wager, generally attempt to even their bets; investigations indicate that the amount of money laundered through legal sports books in this manner is in the "millions of dollars.")

That said, there's no chance that illegal bookies are going to pick up their parlay cards and go home, Vegas or no Vegas. Betting on college sports is simply too popular and widespread. And for most gamblers, illegal wagering offers a perk its legalized cousin can't match: credit. "When I was in Chicago, I had clients in Las Vegas because I would extend them credit" says Bill Jahoda, an antigambling activist and former head of the Chicago Mafia's gambling operation. "That's the hook: You can bet money you don't have."

Moreover, newspapers likely will continue to publish college point spreads. A Harris poll conducted in April found that 70 percent of readers use point spreads to obtain more information on games, while only 11 percent use spreads to place bets with bookmakers. "And the line doesn't come just from Nevada," adds Fahrenkopf. "It comes from everywhere. One of the most popular oddsmakers, Danny Sheridan of USA Today, is based in Alabama."

Ultimately, a college-sports betting ban will act like a tourniquet on a severed limb: better than nothing, but hardly enough. So long as gambling flourishes, so will scandal. Consider this: In a single three-year span, 86 college games were fixed in 17 states by 32 players from seven schools. The period in question? 1947-50 -- decades before modern sports books emerged in Nevada.