With March Madness starting this week, the NCAA is taking new steps to get bettors who lose (redundant) to leave college basketball players alone.
In a 30-second video titled “Don’t Be A Loser,” the message is simple. Don’t get mad at the players when your bets on their performances fail to cash.
“There’s losing, and then there’s being a loser,” the video explains. “Game time comes with enough pressure. Way too often, people are betting on sports, losing, and taking it out on the athletes. Only a loser would harass college athletes after losing a bet, but it happens almost every day.”
In a press release, NCAA president Charlie Baker addressed the habit of too many (any is too many) of bettors to harass players through social media and other digital methods.
“The horrific messages we are seeing across online platforms is absolutely unacceptable,” Baker said. “Angry fans are sending numerous abusive messages and threats to student-athletes, publicly and privately, because of lost bets placed on the athlete’s performance in a game. These actions severely threaten student-athlete mental health and well-being, while harming the college athletics environment. We need fans to do better. We need states to do better and ban player props that target student-athletes and enable detrimental abuse.”
That’s really what needs to happen. Player prop bets should be removed from the menu of betting options, in all states that have legalized sports betting. College AND pro.
And while that wouldn’t stop illegal wagering on player props from happening, it would remove an extremely addictive form of wagering from the electronic addiction fountain that we all carry with us, everywhere.
