Massive Point-Shaving Scandal Shows College Basketball’s Integrity Problem Isn’t New

The seedy underside of college sports has resurfaced once again.

And to the surprise of exactly no one with a modicum of knowledge about the sport’s past, basketball is leading the way in shame-inducing headlines.

The latest came Thursday when the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania finally made official what Sports Illustrated has been reporting on for months. Federal prosecutors announced they had secured indictments against upwards of 20 people on charges as diverse as alleged bribery and wire fraud related to rigged college basketball games. Some 39 players on 17 different teams are alleged to have shaved points across roughly 29 major Division I games.

It can be stunning to read and comprehend in retrospect, especially upon seeing that one indicted player, Kennesaw State’s Simeon Cottle, actually played in a game the night prior. Fellow active players Carlos Hart (Eastern Michigan), Camian Shell (Delaware State) and Oumar Koureissi (Texas Southern) all logged at least 12 minutes and scored in the past week.

“How the scheme worked is Mr. [Marves] Fairley, Mr. [Shane] Hennen and these other leaders would bribe NCAA basketball players to the tune of $10,000 to $30,000 per game. The player would then agree to deliberately underperform the game,” said David Metcalf, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. “This was a massive scheme. It enveloped the world of college basketball. It involved conferences such as the Big East, Atlantic 10, the Sun Belt, the Horizon League and involves games against nationally ranked programs. It involves games in the playoffs and conference championships.

“It was a significant corruption of the integrity of sports.”

Perhaps the most damning thing about this latest scandal is that it’s actually hard to bat an eyelash at it all.

This is simply what college basketball has done over the years with small rosters of teenagers and early 20-somethings—which have always poised a target ripe for exploitation—in a sport that features constant action at hundreds of notable programs across the country from late fall until the thick of spring.

“It’s the thing I worry about the most,” NCAA president Charlie Baker told SI last month. “It’s one of the reasons why we’ve changed some of our rules around the way we report investigations around this sort of thing and why we’ve been in front of 150,000 kids on campus to explain to them why they really need to stay the hell away from this stuff.

“Indictments show that we’re doing our job. We run the largest integrity program in the world. I think it’s important to show people that. It’s important for student-athletes and for their friends to know that if you engage in this type of activity, your chances of getting caught are reasonably high.”

Gambling issues have dogged the NCAA nearly from its inception on the hard court, with the occasional game-fixing attempts making headlines at numerous points in the 1910s, ’20s and ’30s. The postwar boom in the decades after that not only led to increased enrollments in colleges from coast to coast, but also pulled even bigger scandals up to the surface as well.

In 1951, allegations dogged numerous programs across the country and in the Big Apple in particular. The 1949–50 City College of New York Beavers may have been one of the greatest teams you normally would have ever heard of, having won both the NCAA tournament and the far more prestigious NIT in the same season. However, players accepted money from gamblers to fix games during the regular season, eventually leading to the suspension of the entire basketball program and sending CCNY with a one-way ticket out of the Division I ranks.

“It’s tough to compare them. I don’t know the exact scope of this case but, I’m just speaking extemporaneously now, I would imagine it rivals it. I mean this is a pretty pervasive corruption scheme,” said Metcalf of a direct parallel to CCNY. “We’re talking about dozens of games and athletes on 17 teams. I do view it as historic for that reason.”

Bring up the NCAA’s infamous “death penalty” and most think of the SMU football scandal in the late 1980s that sent the Mustangs into the wilderness for decades even after their program took off for a few mandated seasons. In reality, Kentucky basketball should be held up as the pariah for the punishment, with the 1950–51 national champions giving way to three players getting arrested for point shaving and a season-long ban for the ’52-53 campaign.

“They couldn’t reach my boys with a 10-foot pole,” Wildcats coach Adolph Rupp claimed at the time of match-fixing gamblers.

Apparently they had an 11-footer handy … and plenty more where that came from.

Future Hall of Famer Connie Hawkins was caught up in a sprawling gambling scandal in the early 1960s that derailed his early career and that of dozens more. The ’78–79 Boston College point-shaving scheme may be one of the most well known for its connection to organized crime and, tangentially, the classic movie Goodfellas.

Numerous other schools, including Tulane, Arizona State and Northwestern, over the years have been caught up in trying to extricate themselves from similar black eyes. The Green Wave, notably, are involved in this type of scandal yet again, named in Thursday’s indictment as one of the 17 schools.

Often, the collective NCAA’s reaction to such headlines is to initially throw the hands in the air in protest to such actions to go along with plenty of additional pearl clutching.

How dare the sanctity of college basketball be spoiled by such nefarious activity!

Then, months later, perhaps we’ll get to the early stages of an investigation. If luck is on the side of the folks at the national office in Indianapolis, things may even proceed to punishing a program within five years for not keeping a close enough eye on its players participating in such rule-breaking. Any coaches in charge will have already been fired and some may have rehabbed their image enough to get another gig on the sideline even before the appeals are finalized.

The only time the NCAA has strayed from such a historical pattern might be in 2017, when a wide-ranging FBI probe into several programs and apparel companies eventually led to indictments out of the Southern District of New York on everything from (surprise, surprise) bribery to wire fraud. The scandal involved so many schools and notable assistants that the calls to rein in and clean up the sport grew so loud that the ill-conceived Commission on College Basketball was formed.

“We need to put the college back in college basketball,” chair Condoleezza Rice said at the time upon releasing a 60-page report.

If college athletics can do anything well, it’s to create a commission, stock it with notable names and write a sternly worded couple of paragraphs. However, just about everything connected to the original case—beyond perhaps ongoing callbacks to a wiretap of then-LSU coach Will Wade saying he “made a strong-ass offer” to a recruit—dissipated into the ether. The lone tangible byproduct put into practice, the IARP, became a rabbit hole to nowhere beyond a few slaps on the wrist.

Let’s hope that vestige of history does not repeat itself, a pointless process being layered over a very real investigation into what is transpiring with the sport. It’s notable that Thursday’s indictments and subsequent news conference dropped right as the NCAA convention was on the verge of wrapping up just south of Washington, D.C., this week. While it will no doubt prove an extensive talking point for coaches, administrators and conference commissioners over the coming weeks, any rash action and trying to earn some public policy points shouldn’t be top of mind for any of them.

Instead, the organization’s current path seems to be a sensible one in terms of advocating for further guardrails around sports gambling, which they have done consistently since Baker took office in 2023 and even included strong language and lobbying efforts earlier this week against the recent rise of prediction markets impacting players and schools.

“I think prop bets, generally, are probably one of the most corrosive elements and bad sports betting for everybody,” Baker says. “It’s brutal on the kids when they don’t hit the so-called prop or when they do. It creates terrible incentives for everybody.”

Few are arguing the other way—unless they are employed by certain sports betting companies themselves.

The NCAA confirmed that its enforcement staff has opened “sports betting integrity investigations” into approximately 40 student-athletes from 20 schools over the past year and have already ruled several permanently ineligible. If any coaches, managers or agents are deemed by the authorities to be involved in this latest case, they should promptly be shown the door, too.

Perhaps the biggest issue the NCAA faces with this regular decades-long cadence of scandals bubbling to the surface is that they are simply caught in the middle of a much bigger cultural shift. The only real solution for those on the ground in college athletics is simply to play a little read-and-react defense while those with even bigger platforms combat the heart of the issue at play.

“The evidence shows that the monetization of college athletics—and athletics generally through the liberalization and proliferation of sports betting markets—as well as the normalization of compensating athletes, furthers the enterprise in this case,” Metcalf said. “We’re going to step in and combat the corruption of this sport. Regulators and policy makers, I’m sure we’ll have to adapt to this and everyone’s figuring this out.”

That doesn’t have to include a blue-ribbon NCAA committee or more hearings on the topic as college sports get in some grandstanding to rail against the latest black mark on the enterprise.

Given what history has told us, we’ll be back here doing this all again soon enough.

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