With the recent legalization and subsequent popularization of sports gambling in most states throughout the country, experts seem to think it’s only a matter of time before a gambling scandal breaks out in college athletics.
Mark Potter is the head of delivery at Epic Risk Management, which works closely with the NCAA on educational programs related to problem gambling. And during a recent interview with On3, he said he is “almost certain” there will be some sort of gambling scandal in college athletics at some point in the future.
“The sheer amount of colleges there are, and the sheer amount of opportunities there are now, I would be almost certain that there will be something,” Potter told On3. “You can’t educate everybody. You can’t make everybody do the right things, make everybody make good decisions. We can just try to minimize that as much as we can. I fear that it will take something like this, a major scandal, for some people in some organizations to really take notice of how serious this is.”
Michelle Malkin, assistant professor at East Carolina and a nationally recognized expert on problem gambling, agreed with this assessment, saying there is a 100 percent chance that some sort of gambling scandal takes place at a college campus this year.
“Because of the lack of regulatory oversight, because people do get away with stuff, I think we may have people getting away with stuff more often than we know about it,” Malkin said. “So I don’t know that we’ll actually see the controversy, even though it occurs. I do believe, within the next five years, there will be a public controversy.”
It’s certainly something the NCAA needs to be prepared to deal with.
[On3]
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