In the eight years since the Supreme Court cleared the way for legal sports gambling across the country, the bad headlines for college sports have picked up.
Coaches being tainted by scandals at their programs. The social media pressure on athletes to perform for gamblers. The arrests and indictments of players, former players and associates betting on the outcome of games few remember. The back-and-forth over whether to allow college athletes, who can now earn millions, to bet on pro or college sports.
This week, the problems were underscored in a dramatic way: Brendan Sorsby, set to become the well-paid quarterback of Big 12 defending champion Texas Tech, stepped away to seek treatment for a gambling addiction. Investigations are reportedly under way involving a potential Heisman Trophy hopeful and his stays at Indiana and Cincinnati before his transfer to Texas Tech ahead of next season.
Details have not been released about Sorsby’s gambling. But experts estimate that thousands of athletes in men’s college sports are engaged in compulsive gambling.
“Statistically, I think this is still only the tip of the iceberg,” said Keith Whyte, a gambling industry consultant and former executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling. “Given the elevated risk factors for young, male college athletes to demonstrate a high propensity to bet on sports and take on other risk-taking behaviors, there’s probably a lot more guys that have problems. So in some ways, I really admire his decision to publicly seek help for a gambling problem.”
The NCAA is the largest organization in college athletics, with some 500,000 athletes across 1,100 schools in three divisions. Its most recent survey of athlete gambling behaviors, released in January 2025, asked 13,306 male athletes across all divisions about their wagering habits.
Some 21.5% (2,861) acknowledged having placed at least one sports wager in the previous year; 10.7% (1,424) acknowledged having done so in the previous month. In Division I, 12.6% of the males (619 of 4,913) reported having gambled at least once in the previous year, 4.7% (231) in the previous month and 1.9% (93) in the previous week.
Across the three divisions, mobile online sports wagering platforms were by far the preferred vehicle for placing bets and college football ranked behind the NFL, NBA and college basketball among most popular sports for betting.
The NCAA, extrapolating from survey results, estimated about 6,000 mostly male athletes across the three divisions would meet standard diagnostic criteria for problem gambling in any given year.
College-aged male athletes check a lot of boxes in a compulsive gambler’s profile, according to Michelle L. Malkin, lead research scholar of the Gambling Research and Policy Initiative at East Carolina. Those athletes are in their 20s, highly competitive, aggressive and typically have a refuse-to-lose mentality.
“Just think about the person who’s down 20 points going into the fourth quarter and being told, ‘Keep going, you can still win this game.’ So the lifetime exposure of ‘if I just keep going, it’s going to turn around for me’ is the type of thing that leads to that lower risk aversion, which also leads to this (gambling addiction),” Malkin said.
The introduction of revenue-sharing and name, image and likeness compensation has put extra money in athletes’ pockets, significant amounts in some cases. Sorsby, for example, signed a two-year NIL agreement with Cincinnati that paid him $875,000 last year, according to a lawsuit filed by the school seeking a $1 million buyout from Sorsby for transferring to Texas Tech.
Whyte said athletes earning hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars wouldn’t place a lot of importance on losing a few dollars here and there. “That can lead to some risky decisions,” he said.
Eligibility can be at stake for NCAA athletes found to have gambled, and that can keep them from disclosing an addiction.
Malkin said there should be a confidential avenue for an athlete to ask for help, as long as the athlete didn’t bet on their own team. About the only option an athlete would have is to connect with an online therapist. NCAA rules require anyone who works in an athletic department to report gambling activity.
Athletic departments typically put on seminars to warn athletes about gambling and about risks to eligibility. Malkin said most athletes who gamble were doing so before they entered college, so lectures generally won’t stop existing behavior.
Malkin leads a team developing curricula for regular college students and athletes that explains how gambling can become addictive. East Carolina’s “Betting Blueprint” explores healthy gambling, financial wellness, risk, identifying gambling-related harms and where to seek help.
John Holden, an associate professor of business law and ethics at Indiana and a gaming law expert, said the NCAA is in a difficult position because it must balance punishment of athletes who bet on college sports with providing help to those who come forward to ask for help.
“The NCAA needs to take time and study what is a reasonable approach, what is something that protects integrity of the game and then, at the same time and the bigger issue, is what resources are they providing to athletes that might experience problems with gambling?” Holden said.
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