By Cat Murphy
Demands for Venmo transfers because of a turnover. Harassing messages over lost bets. Cheating allegations against star players and top teams.
Regardless of which team wins Monday night’s men’s college basketball championship game between No. 1 seed Michigan and No. 2 seed UConn, student-athletes from both teams will almost certainly face abuse like this from bettors who lose money on the game.
When the final buzzer sounds, the American Gaming Association predicts Americans will have wagered a record $3.3 billion on this year’s March Madness tournaments.
Some of those gamblers spent the last month flooding student-athletes’ social media feeds with abusive, harassing comments, an analysis of Instagram comments by the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism shows.
When No. 1 seed Arizona fell to the Michigan Wolverines Saturday, one Instagram user accused Wildcats freshman Koa Peat of game-fixing. Another blamed Illinois freshman Keaton Wagler for ruining their wagers in the No. 3 seed’s loss to UConn.
But the winning players were also susceptible to this kind of abuse.
After Michigan’s Yaxel Lendeborg exited in the first half against Arizona with an apparent leg injury, one Instagram user accused the standout player of “faking” the injury.
“Point shaver,” the user wrote in another comment on the same post.
Lendeborg re-entered the game in the second half, only for another bettor to say that putting him “back in for no reason killed my bets.”
“Kinda sus,” the user wrote.
Harassment related to betting losses has become ingrained in college athletics in recent years amid an explosion in sports betting.
Nearly 10% of the roughly 7,500 Division I student-athletes who responded to an NCAA survey earlier this year reported experiencing abuse related to betting losses. Among men’s basketball players, that number was closer to half.
In an effort to combat this kind of harassment, the NCAA aired anti-harassment advertisements throughout this year’s men’s and women’s March Madness tournaments.
“When people are betting on you — every pass, every shot — it’s not just the coach in your ear,” the ad says. “It’s the comment sections, the DMs, the losers who make threats and harass you.”
But this message hasn’t deterred some commenters, according to the Povich Center and Howard Center analysis.
Following the Elite Eight round of the tournament, UConn freshman Braylon Mullins was subjected to threats of violence after his stunning three-pointer powered the Huskies past No. 1 seed Duke.
“If I ever see you Braylon I’m literally going to f—ing hurt you,” one Instagram user told Mullins. “I will seriously f— you up and make your life a living hell.”
To that, another user replied: “so u lost ur bet? … is what [you’re] really saying.”
Not all the gambling-related comments were negative, though. Some bettors celebrated Mullins’ shot.
One commenter told the 19-year-old they had “finally won a bet” because of him. Other bettors said “I love you bro” and “you the realest” — all because his game-winning triple had saved their parlays.
“You won me $200 on that shot dude!” another Instagram user said to Mullins.[/vc_column_text]
Within hours of Michigan’s win over No. 6 seed Tennessee in the Elite Eight, one commenter said they were putting Lendeborg on their Final Four betting slip, asking him to “just give 18+” points.
Another commenter, using the fingers-crossed emoji, told Michigan junior Elliot Cadeau they needed him to get “over 9.5 assist[s] next game.”
Comments like these refer to what are known as player proposition bets, or prop bets. Rather than wagering on outcomes at the game or team level, player prop bets enable gamblers to bet directly on a range of individual player performance metrics.
“Player prop bets attach an individual student-athlete’s name to a bet and therefore increase the likelihood of betting harassment being targeted toward that student-athlete,” NCAA President Charlie Baker said earlier this year in a letter urging state gambling commissions to ban prop bets.
Prop bets on college athletes are currently legal in more than half of the 39 states with legalized sports betting and Washington, D.C., according to the NCAA.
The Povich Center and Howard Center analysis found at least 15 platforms carried player prop bets on the men’s Final Four games. In total, the centers identified more than 1,000 athlete-specific wagers offered during the tournament’s semifinal round.
This figure included at least one individual wager on 29 of the 33 student-athletes who played five or more minutes in the Final Four. It also encompassed bets on more than a dozen different player-specific performance metrics, with gambling sites advertising bets on everything from rebounds to fantasy scores to the first points scorer.
The analysis includes instances where multiple platforms offered the same bet; still, it likely undercounts the true volume of player prop bets available to gamblers.
As of publication, gambling platforms had already set hundreds of individual betting lines on at least 15 student-athletes expected to play in the national championship game Monday night.