It will be either an extremely jaded or supremely observant basketball fan who makes the connection on Thursday, especially given the hours at which Saint Louis and Kennesaw State tip off during the first full day of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
The No. 9 Billikens commence against No. 8 Georgia in Buffalo, New York at 7:45 p.m. ET, and the 14th-seeded Owls against No. 3 Gonzaga in Portland, Oregon at 10 p.m. ET. Those times do not make for sharp thinking after a day of brackets, beers, and so many appetizers.
But those still conscious and looking for a little perk-up may end up down a Google rabbit hole plumbing whether a 21-13 Kennesaw State team may have a chance against the spread.
They’ll find a link to a local story about the adversity the team overcame, with one of its starters being injured in a preseason car accident and some other detail they didn’t scroll far enough to read. A quick check of the team’s leading average scorer reveals that guard Simeon Cottle, the Conference USA Preseason Player of the Year, puts in 20.2 a game. Go a little deeper on him …
There it is.
Cottle and former teammate Demond Robinson allegedly took a $40,000 bribe in a March 1, 2024 game to assure that the then-woeful Owls would not cover as an underdog against Queens University.
Wait. This guy was on the team this year?
The inflection point will have been reached, with points of view collaborating with pints on a hot take.
How do I know this game isn’t rigged?
Well, Kennesaw State is a conference champion with a winning record, which might suggest the team wasn’t throwing any games this season, so the inward debate would begin.
Yeah, but one of the players from this year is accused of doing that before. What if they didn’t catch them all?
Polls and perceptions
This sort of suspicion, if not outright cynicism, abounds ahead of the tournament, according to a series of academic and news polls.
According to the 2026 Sacred Heart University Nationwide Sports Gambling Poll, in conjunction with GreatBlue Research (sample size: 1,500):
- 56.9% of Americans say sports betting impacts the integrity of college basketball either “significantly” or “somewhat”
- 63.2% say they are at least “somewhat concerned” that college athletes may be influenced by gambling activity
- 51.2% believe that college students are at higher risk for problematic gambling behavior compared to the general population
“College athletics occupy a unique place in American sports culture,” said Andrew Miller, director of SHU’s sports communication & media graduate program. “Americans may accept legalized sports betting overall, but they clearly feel differently when the pressures associated with gambling reach student-athletes.”
The level of concern was directly impacted by the age of the respondent. Sixty-nine percent of those 55 and older were concerned about student-athletes susceptibility to gambling-related pressures, while the number fell to 60% for those younger than 55 years old.
Gambling scandals eroding fan trust
The Sacred Heart study falls in line with other recent research, including a December 2025 NBC News Decision Desk poll in which 70% of 20,252 respondents thought sports gambling “lessens the integrity of the game.” A November 2024 Quinnipiac poll found that a third of those polled feel that NBA coaches and players are compromised.
The topic has even become the stuff of doctoral theses. Anecdotally, the same conclusions about the growing distrust can be measured by the vitriol oozing through social media after any remotely questionable effort by a player or call by an official. Outrage often originates from angry bettors. Once amplified enough by algorithms, the outrage seeps into the consciousness of mainstream fans for whom the gambling isn’t even relevant.
The rigged games from the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons described in the NCAA point-shaving indictments (so-called “fixer” Jalen Smith pleaded guilty on March 10) were subtle enough to have avoided — by design — casual fans’ gaze. But the discovery of them cements the thinking that everything is corrupt. This despite the NCAA telling ESPN that there were no suspicious wagering incidents in men’s basketball play this season and integrity monitor Sportradar reporting that corruption cases were moving toward “containment.”
An October Pew Research poll found that the percentage of the 9,916 fans and bettors surveyed that believe betting is “a bad thing” for sports had grown to 40% from 33% in 2022. The percentage deeming it “neither good nor bad” for sports fell to 42% from 49% over the same period.
“The perception is that increasingly these games feel rigged,” Jon Solomon, the community impact director, sports and society at Aspen Institute, told InGame. “And that’s a concern for the leagues, because that’s pretty much the number one thing as a sports league you don’t want to have — people questioning the integrity of your games. People watch sports to believe that there’s an element of fairness to it and that you don’t know what the outcome is going to be. And it’s going to be decided competitively and fairly on the court or the field. You don’t want to turn this into professional wrestling where everybody knows that it’s fake.”
Social media, replay, our leap to anger
A fading belief in the purity of sports could be a natural extension of a cynical society, said Solomon.
“People just don’t trust institutions,” he said. “In general, in all walks of life: the presidents, Congress, journalism, higher education, sports leagues as well.”
With improved replay technology allowing fans to autopsy every play and call, wager on much of it, then amplify their feelings on social media, the gambling scandal that engulfed former NBA official Tim Donaghy in 2007 would have mushroomed today, Solomon said.
“That scandal brought out some conspiracy theorists that I never believed,” he said. “I just thought it was this one bad ref who did something really wrong. And now it feels like there’s this belief that every official or every commissioner is rigging everything.
“And then there’s money on the line as well. There’s all these elements sort of swirling in there.”
David Carter, an adjunct professor of sports business, USC Marshall School of Business, doesn’t think the problem has reached a crisis level yet.
“I don’t think a meaningful percentage of those watching basketball are concerned with the integrity of outcomes — at least not yet,” he told InGame. “The real issue arises when they believe one-off instances become an ongoing, chronic part of the game. Historically, fans have met gambling crises with a bit of a shoulder shrug. But as the notoriety and pervasiveness of gambling and the revenue generated from it continues to grow, fans, both casual fans and gambling fans alike, will become more attuned to gambling-related controversies. And if this happens and the integrity of the game is called into question, all revenue flows, whether from sponsors, the media, or fans, will be compromised.”
Some college basketball fans may have suspicions, but they keep watching in droves, driving ad revenue.
Where information lacks, emotion acts
Matthew Bakowicz, the director of the sports management program at American University’s Kogod School of Business, agreed that vantage point matters. He likened the dynamic to unhappy customers being more likely to leave an online review.
“First of all, most of those people that say the game’s rigged probably lost their bet,” said Bakowicz, who also teaches gambling awareness to student-athletes.
As a former Simplebet trader and DraftKings sportsbook manager, Bakowicz believes most casual bettors are ignorant to how the industry works.
“The rigging [accusation] comes from them not thinking the game is going to be close,” Bakowicz explained. “The casual fan will say that X team’s going to kill them, or there’s no way they’re going to score that many points because of all the games they’ve watched. What they didn’t say is, ‘I simulated the game one million times. The final score is 72-70. There’s no way the game gets to 150. I’m betting the under because if this game is played a million times, probability is going to suggest that I have a 68 percent chance of this happening and that’s what’s going to happen.’”
Instead, he added, bettors “lose by a point and go, ‘It’s rigged.’”
“Is it rigged?,” he pondered. “No, you’re making an irrational comment based on emotions and not strong statistical data.”
Bakowicz believes the increased use of artificial intelligence by gamblers and the general public could eventually alleviate bettor rage and fan cynicism. This, too, will likely begin with the gamblers, he said.
“AI is going to spit out a suggestion. And they’re going to look at that and say, ‘OK, I kind of understand why the bookies had the line at 72.5 for first-half points,’” he explained. “And they’re going to be a bit more knowledgeable as to why the number is where it’s at and not be as upset.
“I think the information flow is going to trickle down to the casual fan. And that’s going to be a result of the media and the integration of AI.”
Solomon agreed that as a society that’s simultaneously enmeshed yet subdivided by social media, emotion often fills the absence of information.
“We see it in all aspects of life,” he said. “The gambler or the average sports fan on social media becomes triggered because they lose money, or they didn’t get their particular way.
“And they think they have all the answers. But they aren’t an expert. They don’t know what happened on a particular play and why the athlete failed or what injury the athlete has, or what’s going on in that athlete’s life that may have contributed to it. We are so much more disengaged from the facts, but we have more access and have more anger and then can directly vent it easier to each other.
“And then you factor in the algorithms too, which only amplify anger. So it’s kind of this vicious cycle.”
Would eliminating college props help?
NCAA President Charlie Baker has implored sportsbooks and politicians to abolish prop bets on college games. But the allegations in the January NCAA indictments involved point-shaving to manipulate spreads, not individual statistical categories, as was the case in the Jontay Porter and Terry Rozier scandals. Bakowicz said the popularity of microbets and the corresponding industry focus on them will win out in professional sports. But in college, he said, there is a need for introspection.
“I think if you look at industry concerns, especially for the well-being of students and to keep the student-athlete and keep the student in focus, you’re going to see a re-examination of the idea of prop bets around collegiate athletes,” he said. “And I do think that’s for the better, not because I want to see sportsbooks have less products, but because of how big it’s gotten.
“Any time something has a lot of volume involved and is new and is definitely dominating the landscape, it’s always good to revisit just to make sure we’re doing things the right way and in the best interest of the athletes — in this case, the student-athletes.”
One shining moment still possible?
The perception of impropriety in men’s college basketball almost certainly dwarfs the level of it, Bakowicz said. Perhaps the recent rooting out of corruption scandals — and then the absence of them in the future — will restore faith and change poll numbers. That will be up to fans to figure out. But, he said, corruption can’t be as widespread as some fans currently believe, with fewer than 20 players out of around 18,000 that competed in Division I the last three seasons having been accused of impropriety.
“Are we always going to see one incident where somebody will do something wrong and it’ll be proven that it’s rigged? That’s life,” he said. “We wouldn’t have a police force if we never had that in society.”
