Greg Sankey explains heightened concern over gambling issues, additional training

Sports gambling became a hot topic in college sports this spring with a number of investigations and punishments befalling a number of coaches and programs. The first such case arose in the SEC around Alabama baseball, ultimately leading to the firing of then-head coach Brad Bohannon — and it’s spurred commissioner Greg Sankey and his cohort to redouble their efforts on gambling education.

As for the recent surge in sports gambling, Sankey doesn’t think you need to look any further than increased societal permissiveness. Since around 2018, more than 35 states have legalized sports gambling, something Sankey emphasized as the SEC spring meetings this week.

“Well there are 38 states that have legalized gambling. And I think separate from — and I’ll come back to Eli’s observation — 38 states. Since what, May of 2018, have adopted legalized gambling. I guess 36 because New Jersey and Nevada had legalized gambling. So, what’s causing it is there’s much more access. It has become inculturated. I think you can go back to some of my comments since then and I warned about the inculturation of gambling and people will behave differently. And that is what we’re seeing,” Sankey said.

The Eli referenced is Missouri head football coach Eli Drinkwitz, who alluded to athletes having NIL money as a driver of gambling.

Sankey disagreed with that notion, offering his above response. But he did agree with Drinkwitz in general that there should be some level of concern about how tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a late adolescent is affecting behavior.

But he added that’s up for experts to study and figure out so leaders can act accordingly.

“Now what that means behaviorally is for adolescent psychologists to speak of, directly,” Sankey said. “What that means developmentally for young people moving from adolescence to adulthood. So I don’t associate gambling activity, of late, with Name, Image and Likeness. But I do look at this massive influx of money and at 18, I didn’t need that. I made $17 dollars an hour on a construction job and thought I was wealthy and probably didn’t manage that really well. And that’s pennies compared to what’s happening now. So, I do think that’s an area of attention, an area of conversation, an area of research: What kind of behaviors are coming from those realities?”

As for the SEC addressing gambling in the short term, Sankey said the league brought in Matt Holt, the founder and CEO of U.S. Integrity, a private firm that monitors sports gambling and various leagues to ensure fair, transparent competition.

The SEC has brought Holt in to meet before, but Sankey said those were all a more pre-ordained meeting — something that had been on the schedule for months. Bringing Holt to the spring meetings was a more spur-of-the-moment call, one that Sankey expressed was needed as the pitfalls of sports gambling came into clearer focus.

“And it provides a flow of information and it’s also illuminating,” Sankey said. “Like, learning what Vegas knows will open your eyes. And I mean that as a compliment. Because I told a story of having been at a visit with the general manager of Hera’s Casino, it was on the riverboat in Shreveport, Louisiana, like in 1990, maybe ’95, Southern Conference sponsor trip. But I left an hour and a half later, I walked out thinking ‘That was the best person I’ve ever had a meeting with.’ They just know their business. So, U.S. Integrity is part of the strategy and can provide us real-time information on what’s actually happening, the growth of sports gambling activity, to a certain extent even the demographics.”

The SEC commissioner is also not well-wishing this problem away. He pointed to New York state bringing in approximately $1 billion annually in sports wagering revenues.

State legislatures aren’t going to walk away from that sort of revenue stream, Sankey said. So acting accordingly seems to be the SEC’s chosen path forward.

“When you look at the state budget challenges, they’re not walking away from that money, it seems. So that is part of the learning experience. That, in addition to their part of the strategy, they can help us understand the emergence, where there’s mobile betting. how that’s monitored, how geo-fencing works or doesn’t work,” Sankey said. “I mean, you can go down kind of a stream of issues that we’ve got to be attentive to in this new world.”