With play scheduled to start next week, all bets are off, so to speak, for making any changes this year.
But at least a handful of Massachusetts lawmakers seem determined to halt the more pernicious aspect of online sports betting — the so-called prop bet, which are wagers on specific plays or occurrences. They can be placed before a game or even once play has started.
Will a specific basketball player score more than 15 points? Will a reliever’s next pitch clock more than 95 miles per hour?
Because of the pace of the action, prop bets, called by some experts the most addictive form of sports betting, have also become the most controversial — and the most corrupting. Athletes, even student athletes, are often even harassed or threatened by disappointed bettors who’ve lost prop bets involving them.
Baker has called for an end to prop betting in college sports and now both the Big Ten Student-Athlete Issues Commission and Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti have added their voices to the cause.
“We believe protecting student-athletes must be a priority,” the Big Ten athletes said in a letter. “Limiting or eliminating prop betting on college athletics would be a meaningful step toward reducing harassment, protecting mental well-being, and preserving the integrity of college competition.”
The saddest fact is that for some young college athletes it has become too big a temptation, as they fall prey to the promise of quick money and clever “fixers,” some of the latter even found among team staffers.
This week one of those identified by federal prosecutors among the fixers in a college basketball point shaving scheme, Jalen Smith, a trainer in North Carolina, pleaded guilty in the case. Also indicted were 20 college basketball players, some of whom had earlier been identified by NCAA investigations.
In a letter to the heads of all state gambling commissions sent at the time of that indictment in January, Baker wrote, “One issue that deeply troubles the NCAA is betting markets centering around many aspects of a student-athlete’s individual athletic performance, otherwise known as player prop bets. While these types of bets are prohibited in some states [Massachusetts included] with legalized sports betting, they are still offered in a majority of jurisdictions.”
Massachusetts also prohibits betting on local collegiate teams unless they are in a tournament — like, say, March Madness.
Of course, when it comes to online gambling there’s always a work-around and plenty of ways to play a team or game prop.
Massachusetts adopted sports betting in 2022, in a bill signed into law by then-governor Baker. And between its launch on Jan. 31, 2023, and this January it has netted some $408 million for state coffers.
But now at least some lawmakers are having second thoughts about its spread.
“We unleashed an industry that now promotes betting on anything and everything imaginable and unimaginable all over the world, 24 hours a day, every single day,” Senator John F. Keenan told a legislative committee hearing on his bill to ban all prop betting on college and professional sports in the state and prohibit sports betting ads during televised sporting events.
“I want to publicly apologize to those who’ve lost the opportunity to sit and watch a game just for the enjoyment of the game,” he added.
The bill was approved on a 5-0 vote by the Senate Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies and sent on to the Senate Ways and Means Committee. The legislation also proposes to increase the state excise tax on the gross receipts on online and mobile wagers from the current 20 percent to 51 percent, the same rate charged by New Hampshire and Oregon (those states, though, offered DraftKings a monopoly in return for the high rate).
The time is ripe for Massachusetts to rein in some of the more addictive — and corrupting — aspects of online gambling, just as professional sports have been attempting to do, sport by sport and sometimes scandal by scandal.
The federal indictment of two members of the Cleveland Guardians led Major League Baseball, through its gambling partners, DraftKings and FanDuel, to put a $200 limit on prop bets on individual pitches.
The National Basketball Association was hit with its betting scandal last November, which included the use of insider information on player injuries. Recently the new head of the NBA Players Association, Fred VanVleet, told The New York Times that the online gambling proceeds — which make up roughly 1 percent of the basketball-related revenue shared between the league and the players — didn’t make up for the risks to players in harassment and to their reputations.
“It’s not substantial enough to make it worth any of this,” he said. “For us or for the league, quite frankly.”
The NFL in a memo last fall, pointing to the scandals in other sports, issued its own rules aimed at protecting the sport from what it called the “corrosive effect” of prop betting with few guardrails.
The league says it was working with state legislators, regulators, and sports betting companies to limit or outright prohibit prop bets in the NFL.
The real question for Massachusetts is how many leagues and how many players have to beg state gambling commissions and lawmakers from coast to coast to relieve them of a problem that, yes, they did help to foster. Legislators may decide the taxes and advertising limits in Keenan’s bill go too far, but they should still craft some kind of crackdown on prop bets. The problem is real — for the sports, for athletes, and for those addicted to wagering on both. And that makes it time for a legislative solution.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.
