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NCAA Study Finds Gambling Drives Player Abuse

A recent study funded by the NCAA found that regulated sports betting is driving some very serious harassment of college athletes. Online Abuse in NCAA Championships, which was conducted by the Signify Group, found more than 5,000 social media posts of a harassing nature aimed at college athletes, coaches and officials. 

Surprisingly an astonishing eight percent of those abusive posts occurred during the NCAA Tournament (aka, March Madness). 

The study analyzed the social media accounts of more than 3000 college athletes, 500 coaches, and 200 event officials from a variety of sports during their playoffs, tournaments, or championship equivalents. What researchers found was that about six percent of the content posted to their sites was threatening. In fact, 96 of the posts were so threatening that they were turned over to law enforcement. And these were only the public-facing threats, not threats that were sent via direct message. 

Signify co-founder and CEO Jonathan Hirshler told ESPN.com that the nature of threats towards college athletes has changed dramatically since the onset of regulated sports betting saying, “When we started doing this work about four or five years ago, we were predominantly dealing with a lot of racist issues. It just goes to show that [betting] has moved into a very significant area of the work that we do, in terms of the volume of abuse that’s triggered by angry gamblers, sports betting and match-fixing.”

The kind of online abuse of college athletes by aggrieved gamblers has become so severe in recent years that many states have prohibited prop bets on college players entirely.