Prop bets, prediction markets and college sports

Hey there,

The college football season is officially over! Today, I have some commentary on college sports betting and the $20.5 million cap, as well as info on NIL spending and college basketball roster retention.

— Kyle

KICKOFF

Could eliminating the roster cap number help college sports?

There’s been a steady drumbeat over the past few weeks around college football’s proposed salary cap, and it’s only getting louder.

The question at the center of it all is simple: Does a $20.5 million roster cap actually solve anything, or does it just create another layer of fiction in a sport that has already outgrown pretending it isn’t professional? Miami athletic director Dan Radakovich and Ohio State’s Ross Bjork both think the answer is obvious. In separate interviews last week, each publicly floated the idea of scrapping the cap entirely, echoing a sentiment that has become increasingly common behind closed doors.

Radakovich summed it up best when he noted that capping compensation has never really worked in this industry. Bjork made a similar point, questioning whether restricting benefits ever leads to the “right thing” actually happening. They’re not wrong. And that’s where this conversation needs to be more honest, especially in light of the College Sports Commission not doling out any publications. 

Yes, enforcement is difficult. But the bigger issue is that enforcement is effectively nonexistent. There’s no meaningful deterrent in place. And when rules exist without consequences, they don’t preserve order; they incentivize creative circumvention. I’m not calling for a heavy-handed crackdown, but pretending a cap exists while everyone uses third parties to build $30 million or $40 million football rosters is not effective. 

Should the free market reign? That idea makes some people uncomfortable, usually accompanied by the warning that “the rich will just get richer.” However, that argument no longer holds up. We’ve already watched it fail. 

The sport has been professionalized, whether anyone wants to admit it. Trying to legislate competitive equity through artificial limits has never worked in college football. It didn’t work before NIL, and it’s not going to change in the NIL/revenue-sharing era. 

The Darian Mensah saga is a perfect example of the chaos created by half-measures. A coveted quarterback announces he’s staying at Duke, then enters the transfer portal on the final day, with Miami rumored to be offering the largest contract in the sport. 

Administrators and coaches want fewer restrictions because they feel boxed in by rules that don’t reflect reality. But here’s the irony: fewer rules around money might actually clean things up. Transparency tends to do that. The sport is already messy, already uneven, already operating in gray areas.

College football won’t collapse if the cap disappears. It actually may finally start to self-correct once it stops pretending it’s something it’s not.

Money in college football, by the numbers

Opendorse released its 2025 college football annual report of sorts. And the numbers are staggering. 

NIL spending reached nearly $2 billion, with $1.6 billion going directly to the players. 

To the surprise of no one, spending more money meant more winning. But status as a blue blood didn’t necessarily correlate to more success, a continued positive step for college football. 

For the first time, Opendorse determined the correlation between NIL investment and on-field success. On average, every $2 million spent was worth a win, and $15-plus million is worth at least 11 wins and playoff contention. The $13 million to $14 million range positions a program for at least 10 wins and conference championship game contention. The $8 million to $10 million window should position a team for eight wins. 

Only 1.5 percent of players earned $1 million, with 30.5 percent getting between $10,000 and $49,999 and 16.9 percent getting between $50,000 and $99,999. 

Transfer quarterbacks accounted for 16.9 percent of the total NIL revenue-sharing allocation.

And 76.1 percent of social media-based NIL activity took place on Instagram.  

Athletes with agents earned twice as much as unrepresented players. Players should have representation, but that stat could force some players to enter agreements with shady agents. NIL has allowed some people to take advantage of players and charge exorbitant percentages.

Woj is podcasting

ESPN’s Pete Thamel and former scoop maestro Adrian Wojnarowski, the general manager of St. Bonaventure men’s basketball, recently recorded a great podcast episode. During the conversation, they discussed how the transfer portal and NIL have hurt mid-major basketball programs. 

I don’t think any sport has seen a wider gulf because of the portal and NIL than college basketball. The number of upsets has dropped in the NCAA tournament, and there isn’t going to be a dramatic turnaround. The level of difficulty in retaining high-end talent for mid-majors is tremendous. 

Look at the all-conference teams in the Atlantic-10, the MAC and the Sun Belt. Most of them will be gone the following season. 

“What’s happened is they’ve taken away the mid-majors’ great competitive advantage, which was continuity,” Wojnarowski said. “Age and continuity were the two things that allowed mid-majors to eventually rise and pop. And that’s in football and in basketball.

“You no longer have the ability to have continuity and to keep great players for long periods of time. It’s just simply not fiscally possible. There may be some anomalies, there may be some exceptions, but for the most part if you flash at a Mountain West school now, if you flash at a Conference USA school, you’ve just gotten yourself a raise. Now, there will be some loyalties, there will be some things … I just think it probably hasn’t been articulated how big that gap has quickly become.”

More news and links:

• The Big Ten and SEC are at a stalemate over future CFP formats.

• Who was the biggest winner in Monday’s national championship game? Adidas. Indiana-Miami was the first-ever all-Adidas national title game.

• Dan Wolken of Yahoo Sports had a great column asking why Curt Cignetti was passed over during his career. I’ve always been amazed at how much athletic directors overthink coaching interviews. Who cares what a guy is like while he’s wearing a suit and talking to administrators? Hire whoever will win the most games. Period.

• Here’s a 2026 story for you: Higginbotham is introducing NIL Insurance. It’s designed to protect financial commitments by helping schools and companies manage the impact of injuries and other loss of availability. (Urban Meyer is working as an advisor.)

DOWN TO BUSINESS

Prop bets, prediction markets and college sports

Sports betting wasn’t just a topic at the NCAA convention; it became the topic.

Across three days of meetings, panels and press conferences, no issue consumed more attention than gambling. And no one spent more time sounding the alarm than NCAA president Charlie Baker. That urgency only intensified after Thursday’s indictments tied to alleged college basketball game fixing, which put a hard exclamation point on a problem the NCAA has been warning about for years.

Baker has made prop bets a central focus. While four states have already moved to restrict or eliminate props, the NCAA believes the threat runs deeper. Prop bets invite manipulation. They reduce the integrity of competition to a handful of controllable moments and place athletes under immense pressure from bettors. The result has been a sharp rise in online harassment and abuse, much of it directed at young athletes with limited resources or support.

The collision of legalized sports betting and social media has created a toxic ecosystem, one that increasingly jeopardizes athletes’ mental health and personal safety. And this problem is not limited to FBS football or Division I men’s basketball. Athletes in women’s volleyball, FCS football and the Women’s College World Series have reported harassment tied directly to betting outcomes. 

Adding another layer of concern is the emergence of prediction markets, a loosely regulated frontier. Baker has urged the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to pause all college sports offerings in prediction markets until they are governed by standards comparable to sportsbooks. The NCAA’s requested safeguards include age and advertising restrictions, robust integrity monitoring, the elimination of prop markets, anti-harassment measures and meaningful harm-reduction resources.

The core issue, Baker argues, is structural. The rapid expansion of legal sports betting, combined with mobile access and an explosion of niche wagering options, has created ideal conditions for point-shaving. According to Thursday’s indictments, bettors targeted players on struggling teams and exploited first-half lines in games with heavy underdogs — situations where small, deliberate underperformance could swing outcomes without drawing immediate scrutiny.

“The fundamental concept is to not make it possible for people to bet on someone’s underperformance,” Baker said. “What you’re basically doing is creating an opportunity and a moment for someone to control the outcome of their performance.”

He’s right. Today’s betting environment bears little resemblance to the old model, when wagering required a physical trip to a casino and a limited menu of options. Now it’s instant, ubiquitous and in-game. Anyone can place bets anywhere, at any time, while watching the action unfold in real time.

I’m in favor of legal sports betting. I wager a few times a year, and I believe legalization has real benefits. This scandal is evidence that the system works: The alleged wrongdoing was detected, investigated and exposed. Without regulated sportsbooks and integrity monitoring, this scheme likely would have gone unnoticed.

But if sports betting hadn’t been legalized nationwide, would this scheme have existed at all? It’s a fair question, and an uncomfortable one.

I’m not prone to doomsday rhetoric, but the warning signs are impossible to ignore. Across college and professional sports, alarm bells are ringing. The evidence that prop bets are especially vulnerable to manipulation in college athletics is overwhelming. And gambling addiction among young men is reaching what many experts consider epidemic levels.

Legalizing sports betting nationwide seemed reasonable. What we got instead was too much, too fast. An endless menu of bets, available instantly, has proven to be a breeding ground for abuse and corruption.

Baker repeatedly emphasized that the NCAA operates the most comprehensive integrity program in sports and that the education of athletes is ongoing. That may be true, but there’s a limit to what education and enforcement can accomplish. Bad actors will always exist. And in a landscape where elite athletes earn six- and seven-figure NIL deals, it’s naive to think players at low-major programs wouldn’t be tempted by five-figure payouts to shave points in already lopsided games.

At some point, we have to recalibrate our expectations. Point-shaving is here to stay in American sports. The goal should be detection and deterrence.

Don’t forget: The culprits were caught.

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