This week, millions of Americans will catch a case of March Madness. Some will root for their alma maters in the men’s or women’s college basketball tournaments. Many others will root for the team they bet on, or the one they picked in their bracket. The American Gaming Association estimates that Americans will gamble $3.1 billion on the men’s and women’s tournaments. This sum doesn’t even include all the money bet illegally, including entry fees for bracket pools (yes, your office pool is technically illegal). In the U.S., March Madness is one of the most bet-on sporting events of the year.
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However, the 2025 tournament comes at an awkward moment for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), with multiple collegiate athletic programs currently embroiled in gambling-related scandals. Three basketball teams—North Carolina A&T, Mississippi Valley State, and Eastern Michigan—are part of a federal investigation into point shaving; Fresno State players bet in daily fantasy contests involving their own performance; and four New Orleans University basketball players and one former Temple player are being investigated for betting on themselves. This year’s NCAA tournament, then, embodies the contradictions facing sports leagues seeking to protect the integrity of their games while at the same time indirectly profiting from the interest generated by the nation’s online sports gambling boom.
The contradiction facing the NCAA has deep roots. For decades, the organization vigorously opposed sports gambling. It came by this opposition honestly. Between the 1950s and 1980s, multiple basketball programs were engulfed in point-shaving scandals, most famously City College of New York (1951), Boston College (1978-1979), and Tulane University (1984-1985). Such incidents fueled the belief that “gambling and intercollegiate sports just don’t mix,” as NCAA Executive Director—and former University of Iowa basketball coach—Dick Schultz testified in 1991.
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In the early 1990s, Schultz and his fellow sports commissioners argued that gambling had to be kept as far from their games as possible. Sports gambling was legal only in Nevada, and, in response to other states exploring the possibility of legalizing, the leagues lashed out. Rather than go state-by-state to stamp out gambling proposals, the NCAA and the four professional sports leagues enlisted the help of Congress. In 1992, Congress passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which promised to keep gambling out of sports by barring new states from entering the sports gambling business. Nevada, meanwhile, received an exemption.
PASPA did not end the leagues’ crusade against sports gambling. After all, the law did nothing about illegal gambling, and NCAA basketball was rocked by more point-shaving scandals in the 1990s and 2000s. Such incidents likely only deepened the leagues’ opposition to gambling, as well as their insistence that betting was a threat to the integrity of professional and amateur sports. In 2000, NCAA luminaries, including Kentucky men’s basketball coach Tubby Smith and the commissioner of the Big Ten, testified in favor of the Student Athlete Protection Act, which would have banned betting on college sports nationwide, including in Nevada.
The problem facing the NCAA was that, at the very same time its representatives denigrated gambling, the popularity of one of its most profitable products had begun to hinge on Americans’ insatiable appetite for betting. Between 2004 and 2017, the total amount bet on the NCAA basketball tournament more than doubled, reaching over $300 million, more than twice the amount bet on that year’s Super Bowl. These sums did not include all the money gambled with bookies or at offshore, online casinos that skirted U.S. gambling regulations.
Traditional gambling, of course, was only part of the story. March Madness brackets drove the most interest in the tournament, whether participants competed against colleagues, family members, or strangers. These bracket competitions likely date back to the late 1970s and a bar on Staten Island. But in the 1990s and 2000s, thanks to media coverage and the arrival of online bracket challenges, they exploded in interest and became a national pastime.
By 2005, the NCAA estimated that 30 million Americans would participate in a March Madness office pool. In 2009, President Barack Obama, alongside ESPN’s Andy Katz, began what would become an annual tradition during his presidency: filling out a bracket from the White House. In 2023, an estimated 56.3 million Americans filled out at least one bracket.
Bracket contests that involve an entry fee are a form of gambling. And even the many Americans who fill out a bracket without fronting any cash engage in a gambling-like activity. The contest asks them to try to predict the outcome of a sporting event and creates personal or pecuniary consequences for their prediction. The widespread practice of fans viewing games as being about more than the final score is exactly what lawmakers and league officials feared when they ushered in PASPA.
As such, it’s not surprising that the proliferation of March Madness brackets helped lay the cultural groundwork that would ultimately facilitate the rise of legalized sports betting. In the mid-2010s, the emergence of daily fantasy sports offered further evidence that a prohibition on legalized gambling was not working. The commissioners of Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association called for a reversal. They figured that if they couldn’t stop sports gambling, their leagues might as well profit from it. Still, the NCAA stuck to its defense of PASPA, certain that the best way to protect the integrity of college sports was to keep gambling as far in the shadows as possible.
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But in the 2018 case Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, the Supreme Court ruled that PASPA was unconstitutional. States, the Court reasoned, should be able to make up their own minds about gambling.
The results have been dramatic. All four major professional sports leagues have embraced gambling with gusto, from marketing partnerships to stadium naming rights. Over the last seven years, in fact, much of the nation’s sports ecosystem has become a sports gambling ecosystem.
The NCAA, by contrast, has been more hesitant than the professional sports leagues when it comes to gambling. It has, for example, prohibited betting advertisements during game broadcasts. And out of fear of athletes manipulating their own performance as well as concerns over the harassment of athletes by angry bettors, NCAA President Charlie Baker has petitioned states and Congress to ban prop bets on individual college players.
For all his apparent hesitation, though, and his acknowledgment of the problems related to sports betting, Baker is also charged with helping his organization maximize profits. The jeremiads against gambling as a corrupting influence have conveniently quieted. Instead, in 2023 Baker noted, “We have a major opportunity to get into the sports betting space.”
The NCAA, then, continues to try and toe an impossible line: to insist that some forms of gambling are a bridge too far, while at the same time trying to capitalize on the revenue generated by bettors interested in its products. The organization has evolved beyond only moralistic criticism of gambling but it has not resolved the question of how to further normalize betting on sports without putting its students or its student athletes at risk. Hopefully, the NCAA answers these questions before 2028 when, for the first time ever, the men’s Final Four and championship game will be held in Las Vegas, the mecca of American gambling.
Jonathan D. Cohen is the author of Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling (2025) and For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America (2022). He received his PhD in history from the University of Virginia.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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