NCAA president Charlie Baker is escalating his rebuke of college player prop betting as he hopes to “dramatically limit” their availability.
Key Takeaways
- Baker has been invested in limiting college player props since he took over in 2023.
- Several states banned or limited college player prop betting at Baker’s request.
- Baker wants to get rid of most player props in college and supports limiting prop bets in professional leagues.
Prop bets are wagers on events within a game rather than its final outcome. They can be as important as the number of passing touchdowns a quarterback will throw or as small as whether the first pitch of an inning will be a strike.
The more nuanced forms of prop betting rarely have large impacts on how an event or game unfolds. Baker said student-athletes can face “regular” pressure to use those opportunities to helpre acquaintances or bettors profit.
“'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,’” Baker said about the requests given to student-athletes during an interview for “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
Sports betting-related corruption can take several forms. Student-athletes could bet on sports in which they don’t participate; they could wager on games in their sport; or they could agree to fix games for themselves or other known bettors.
Student-athletes are also frequently targets of abuse from online users whenever their results don’t line up with bettors’ predictions.
“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.
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Fighting against player props
Baker served as Massachusetts' governor from 2015-23. He quickly transitioned to becoming president of the NCAA, where he took an immediate interest in preserving the integrity of collegiate sports and championed several betting-related reforms.
“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 bettors around prop bets was really disturbing,” he said during his interview.
Research commissioned by the NCAA has reinforced Baker's concerns. A 2024 report identified roughly 750 instances of betting-related abuse and match-fixing allegations during NCAA championship events, while a 2026 survey of 7,493 student-athletes found widespread concern about sports betting's impact on competition.
Baker told CBS that the NCAA already runs “the largest integrity program in the world” where it “catch(es), unfortunately, a lot of young people betting on sports.”
“(We monitor) 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 X'd off the platforms for the rest of the tournament,” he said.
To Baker and the NCAA’s credit, Signify Group reported a 23% year-over-year decline in betting-related abuse during March Madness 2025. That included a shocking 66% decline in harassment of women.
Anti-player prop campaign takes hold
The prop betting debate has trickled up from the NCAA to professional sports leagues. MLB said last year it was considering banning all player prop betting and has already implemented certain restrictions. The NFL has also made efforts to limit high-risk forms of prop betting.
“This prop betting stuff is bad news. It's bad news for our players, it's bad news for their families,” Baker said, adding he was “really pleased” professional leagues are trying to limit prop bets.
“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.
Baker’s continued campaigns against college player prop betting prompted several states to remove college player prop bets from their legal sports betting markets. Seventeen of 39 states with legal sports betting currently do not allow these bets.
He also championed restricting prop markets made available by prediction platforms earlier this year.
