A sophomore point guard at a mid-major school in Ohio picks up his phone between classes, opens a group chat on Telegram, and places a $200 bet on a teammate's rebounding total that night. No sportsbook app. No kiosk in the student union. No geofence to trip. He is 20 years old, betting through an underground ring that runs on social media, and the proposed campus ban sitting in the Ohio statehouse would not touch him. Not even close.
I have watched this movie before. The impulse to ban something visible so the adults in the room can say they acted is as old as college athletics itself. Tennessee's HB 1768 wants to block interactive sports betting access on public campuses and game days. Connecticut is scrubbing sportsbook ads from university grounds. Ohio legislators, backed by the Center for Christian Virtue, want to end all non-casino sports betting and wipe college wagers off the board entirely. These are serious people with real concerns, and I understand the urgency. But a campus ban is a lock on an open window when the front door has been kicked in.
The Underground Already Won
The NCAA's own investigations found underground campus betting rings thriving through social media group chats, particularly at smaller schools that lack the monitoring technology of a Power 4 program. Banning a DraftKings kiosk from the quad does nothing about the kid running a book out of his dorm on Signal. The federal indictment covering 29 manipulated basketball games between 2022 and 2025 did not describe a failure of campus access policy. It described a failure of culture: players taking $10,000 to $30,000 per game to shave points because nobody had given them a reason not to, or a resource to call when the pressure hit.
Rep. Riordan McClain says the dollars lost to gambling are taken from kitchen tables across Ohio. He is right about that. Gambling addiction destroys families. But prohibition has never been the mechanism that protects those families. It just moves the money somewhere harder to track.
The $700,000 That Should Have Come First
Ole Miss launched the nation's first Center on Collegiate Gambling in March, with $700,000 in annual funding and 8 certified addiction counselors. Good. Overdue. Embarrassingly overdue. That center should have existed a decade ago, replicated at every school in the country, funded before a single state legislature voted to legalize sports betting. Instead, the adults waited until 6% of student sports bettors met clinical criteria for problem gambling, until 40 athletes were under NCAA investigation, until a federal prosecutor had to do the work the institutions refused to do.
I will grant the ban advocates this: player prop bets on college athletes are genuinely dangerous. Individual outcomes are easier to manipulate than game results, and the 11 confirmed cases of athletes betting on their own performances were overwhelmingly tied to props. States like Louisiana, Maryland, and Vermont were right to ban them. That specific prohibition targets a specific mechanism of corruption.
But a blanket campus ban is a different animal. It tells students they cannot do something they are already doing, through channels the ban cannot reach, while offering them nothing in return. No mandatory gambling literacy during orientation. No counseling infrastructure. No honest conversation about the fact that the phone in their pocket is a casino with no closing time.
I think about Bear Bryant telling his players that the first thing you do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging. The hole here is not that students have access to sportsbooks on campus. The hole is that we legalized sports betting in 39 states, marketed it relentlessly to young men, and then acted shocked when college kids started gambling and college athletes started getting corrupted. The ban is not filling the hole. It is putting a tarp over it.
Regulate the props. Fund the counselors. Build the education programs before the next indictment, not after. A campus ban makes legislators feel like they did something. It does not make a single student safer than the kid on Telegram placing his next bet right now.
