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CNN Live Event/Special
Money Madness, College Basketball at a Crossroads. Aired 8-9p ET
Aired April 05, 2026 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[20:00:00]
ED LAVANDERA, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: In case of an emergency if the, for example, cabin pressure drops down. They have about 15 minutes to get into those suits. So that's part of the training that they're going through now to see how quickly they can get them on.
JESSICA DEAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Ed Lavandera with the very latest. An exciting day tomorrow. Thank you so much for that reporting.
And thank you so much for joining me tonight. I'm Jessica Dean. Just remember, if you're here in the U.S., you can now stream CNN whenever you want using our CNN app. Go to CNN.com/watch for more. And we're going to see you again right back here next weekend. CNN's special "MONEY MADNESS" is headed your way next. Have a great night.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JASON EDWARDS, GUARD, PROVIDENCE COLLEGE: Having the ability to play March Madness that could mean everything. Moments like that are once in a lifetime. Being able to not only play in it but win is a chance at real life glory. Stepping on a court, it just felt different. You know, the atmosphere is on fire.
OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN ANCHOR AND CORRESPONDENT: The best drama in sports, the stakes, everything is on the line.
DANIEL PONEMAN, BASKETBALL AGENT: College basketball is more popular than it's ever been. A huge reason for that is sports betters. Why are people watching random mid-major games on a Tuesday? They got money on it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You've won how much?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Close to two million.
BOMANI JONES, SPORTS JOURNALIST: There was no way that this influx of money was not going to result in a gambling scandal.
ELEX MICHAELSON, CNN ANCHOR: Now to sports, another betting scandal.
JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: More than a dozen college basketball players are accused of rigging games. MICHAEL FRANZESE, FORMER CAPTAIN, COLOMBO CRIME FAMILY: College
basketball was easy to manipulate.
JOON LEE, SPORTS JOURNALIST: The industry has become the Wild West.
JONES: But there are still large groups who receive little to no money.
JIMENEZ: It creates this perfect storm of pressure. That dynamic is essentially college basketball's biggest nightmare.
HAMPTON SANDERS, GUARD, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: I love being in basketball so much. I think it's beautiful because of the cohesion that you can have within a team. There's five guys in a court, all of which need each other to succeed. There's an independence amongst that cohesion that's beautiful.
EDWARDS: The thing about basketball that I love the most is like the highs and lows. There's like rainbow of emotions where you can be at super high at one point, be super low, all in a span of five minutes. So it's just like the ability to be like, weather the storm and keep going.
SANDERS: When I really started playing more competitively, it became having an idea like I can play at professional level.
EDWARDS: I was always told to shoot for the stars. Really I just want to be best. Like everything I do in life, I just want to be the best at it.
JIMENEZ: You grew up watching Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, everyone in between. If you're getting into the sport and you're getting into it to be the best that you can possibly be, what's better than that?
EDWARDS: And it can take you to a place you've never been before and it can also really like change your life.
STEVEN "HEDAKE" SMITH, FORMER POINT GUARD, ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY: I put out my energy into a game called basketball. My goal was to balance my way up out of the situation that I was in.
My nickname is Hedake. I got that nickname because of my mom. She said I used to always give her a headache because I'm always bouncing a ball at an early age. My late mother, she made sure I had a roof over my head. She made sure I had food to eat. And she made sure I got to my basketball games. I want to use that game of basketball to take me places I never knew I'd go.
LEE: That idea of social mobility is ingrained in the culture of basketball and especially college basketball because of what college has come to represent in the idea of the American dream and upward mobility over the course of the last 50 years.
SMITH: When you're young, you don't understand the percentage of you making it. But because you're young, guess what? It's your dream so you're going to do it.
JIMENEZ: I played divisional basketball in the Big 10 for Northwestern University.
[20:05:03]
It really was my dream to try to see if you can make to that final level of the NBA. Well, I'm sitting here with you so obviously that didn't happen.
EDWARDS: I think it's really tough to beat the odds and be a part of that small window, that either plays college or a professional in the NBA.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This has been the thing that they have been working for, for their entire life. You thought you're going to be able to make it to the next level as a professional player but it turns out you're not. I think if you're an athlete and you feel like you're not getting your fair share, I understand the instinct for wanting to make more money.
DAVID METCALF, UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, EASTERN DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIA: Good morning, everyone. My name is David Metcalf. I'm the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Our office is announcing criminal charges against 26 defendants that we alleged perpetrated a transnational criminal scheme to fix NCAA Division 1 Men's Basketball games.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The college basketball world rocked by a sports betting scandal.
DON RIDDELL, CNN SPORTS ANCHOR: Another day, another sports betting scandal, I'm afraid.
JIMENEZ: This was a tidal wave of a set of indictments. This is something that involved 39 players. You got 20 charged, 17 different schools. This isn't just happening in one corner college basketball. This is widespread.
JONES: So what's alleged is that there are social media influencers and like alleged fixers who had cooked up this plan to do this and originally tried it in China.
JIMENEZ: The crux of this was these two men, Marvis Fairley and Shane Hennen. Marvis Fairley is essentially a flamboyant out there type of personality.
MARVIS FAIRLEY, SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCER: (INAUDIBLE), season one.
JIMENEZ: Where he wants you to know he's rich and let's get rich together.
SHANE HENNEN, SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCER: Try to get this money, let's go.
JIMENEZ: And then you also had a guy named Shane Hennen. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Shane, you going to take a plea?
HENNEN: Take the under tonight.
JIMENEZ: "Shane Wins" is his social media handle, and that's sort of the lifestyle he was trying to portray.
HENNEN: So $143,000.
JIMENEZ: And he seems to be doing it by just understanding the betting market. Hey, you get with me, you're going to win.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I won a lot of money this weekend, thanks to Sugar Shane Wins. Sugar Shane.
JIMENEZ: The only thing, though, is, as prosecutors say now, this is built on insider information. It's an ancient practice in terms of sports. Point shaving. Essentially someone will bet that a score or someone's score total will be over a certain number or under a certain number. And so the idea is that if you can have influence on that individual person, you got a guaranteed set of money.
So with Fairley and Hennen, a lot of what we know with them started in China, with the player named Antonio Blakeney. This was the leading scorer in the Chinese Basketball Association. And so what happens is, they get into a routine of shaving points.
JONES: And in China it worked. And so therefore they decided to bring their scheme to college players in the United States.
LEE: They would allegedly go through social media. Look at a whole variety of schools, big and small. And they would try to identify people who they thought might be open to some little extra money.
JIMENEZ: I'm not talking about the players from these big time sort of basketball schools.
SANDERS: The NCAA has three divisions of plays in basketball, Division I, Division II, Division III. The ones that are at the top of Division I are the names you know, the Kentuckys, the Dukes, the North Carolinas.
JIMENEZ: Then you've got these mid-major players, still very good players, but the difference in exposure, the difference in the potential to go to the NBA, which obviously would be a lot more money coming their way is much, much lower.
SANDERS: For people to go after the mid-major players, it's strategic. High major basketball, it's the best of the best. So anything that's not the best of the best would be suspicious. At a mid-major team, at of random school, you may not bat an eye on it.
JIMENEZ: It's really easy in basketball to fake a bad game because everybody has real bad games all the time.
LEE: The fixers were basically asking the players to hit the unders on their point totals.
JIMENEZ: It was a lot of, I'm going to pull myself out, I'm not going to score as much as I should, and with that, came payouts from Hennen, from Fairley.
LEE: U.S. attorneys alleged that these athletes took prize between $10,000 and $30,000 across multiple games to shave points.
[20:10:03]
JIMENEZ: If there is one game where a player didn't quite live up to what they were supposed to do, the player would say something, like sorry, this team was so bad I couldn't help it. I was trying but they're so bad. And then the response would be something like, it's all good, you did what you needed to do.
Shane Hennen and Marvis Fairley, as prosecutors say, were betting over $100,000, sometimes over $200,000 on these what seemed like random games.
JONES: All right. This is Markeese Hastings. He's wearing number zero.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hastings from outside.
JIMENEZ: That was a hard miss.
JONES: He put up a shot like it goes off the backboard. It's not even close to going in. That is a shot that looks unbecoming of a college basketball player.
JIMENEZ: OK. So yes, there he goes. He's got the rebound. All right. He got it stripped.
JONES: He doesn't seem to be fighting that hard for rebounds.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And Northern Kentucky is going to have a third chance at it.
JONES: But there's always a confirmation bias, right? Once someone has been accused and you're watching everything looks like there is a fix. So we have got Shawn Fulcher and Isaiah Adams.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This here is a turnaround jumper. No good.
JONES: OK. Those two don't look that bad.
JIMENEZ: Everything looks good to me.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And there's vulture again.
JONES: Let's see.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Pickpockets.
JONES: Oh, these aren't like over-the-top, crazy ones. JIMENEZ: Simeon Cottle plays for Kennesaw State. When you watch him,
again, these aren't plays that are unusual. OK. He fouls someone on a screen. You drive to the basket through contact and you miscalculate a layup, and you don't hit the rim. That happens a lot.
I played basketball all my life. Nothing there looked unusual. If you were just watching these games, I would have to think it's impossible to catch. You need something else.
EDWARDS: When I initially saw the news, it was heartbreaking. You know, I knew some of them. Whether I grew up with them or played against them or played with them, all of them loved the game. I can only like imagine what they're going through in terms of like the shock, the fear about their future, the public humiliation. Like seeing this, it really taught me it can happen to anybody.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
JONES: Basketball generally is vulnerable to point shaving because there are only five people on the floor. So it becomes very easy to have a lot of power as a player on what the outcome is. You know, there's a long track record of point shaving in college basketball.
LEE: Point shaving schemes in college basketball are not new.
[20:15:06]
They're almost tied into the history of college basketball.
LEE: Eight arrests and confessions to dump or shave points in certain games.
JONES: The 1951 CCNY scandal involves seven schools, 32 players, and was truly an existential threat to the future of college basketball.
LEE: Ten years later, there was another scandal with 22 colleges and 37 players, featuring one of the biggest college basketball players in the country at the time, Jack Molinas. The common through line with all of these scandals is the mob's involvement.
FRANZESE: I am not a member of organized crime. Well, I have a liquidation business that involves family portraits.
Yes, Michael Franzese and I was a caporegime, a capo in the Colombo family, one of the five New York mafia families. So I was born into the life.
LEE: For the mob, sports betting was a central business for them.
FRANZESE: I had several bookmakers that were working under me.
I would provide them with protection from the other mob families and the muscle to collect all the money due them.
People don't realize how easy it is to manipulate the outcome of a game. They don't realize it. You can make a lot of money. A lot of money. Well, I was mentioned in "Goodfellas," which was a surprise to me.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And you had Nicky eyes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What's up, guy?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And Mikey Franzese.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I love that guy. Yes, I went to see him.
FRANZESE: I knew these guys since I was a kid, you know, many of them that were older than me. Henry Hill played by Ray Liotta in the movie "Goodfellas," he was real. He was a friend of mine.
JONES: The Boston College point-shaving scandal of the late '70s, like this was masterminded by Henry Hill.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Hill says he fixed nine Boston College basketball games during the '78-'79 season. He says he made $75,000 to $100,000 betting on those games.
FRANZESE: And then because I knew them, you know, I got involved a little bit. I made a couple of bucks on that back then. I was young.
RAY LIOTTA, ACTOR: I don't want to go any place that's cold.
FRANZESE: That scene, after Henry Hill had flipped, became an informant, and they started locking everybody up. They were really arrested because of the Boston College scandal. It was big news back then. Big news.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Stories like this one make me more certain than ever that betting on sports should never, never be legalized.
LEE: But one of the biggest recent scandals in sports gambling history came in 1993 and 1994 at Arizona State University.
SMITH: Arizona State was the place for me. I could shoot pretty good.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Stevin Smith pulls up from about 40 and scores!
SMITH: Playing D-1 basketball, it was like a dream come true. Basketball kept me out of trouble growing up. But then it also got me in trouble.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A scheme was hatched in an off-campus apartment building where ASU guard, Stevin "Hedake" Smith, lived.
SMITH: I was in debt. I was down $10,000. I was gambling on video games. Then the video games turned into betting on NFL games. Then before you knew it, I was in the hole. You got to do whatever it is to clear that debt or things could get ugly.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Smith agreed to fix the number of Sun Devils games for a group of gamblers.
SMITH: Before the game, I would get a call. And he would tell me the number, that we couldn't win by more than six. Just made sure we stayed under that number. Offense ran through me, so I was able to manipulate some things like I knew who could shoot, who couldn't. So shot clock going down, pass to some non-shooters. And I twist my ankle against University of Oregon. I tweaked it real bad.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, my goodness.
SMITH: I got worried because I was no longer in control. That would have hurt the odds of executing the point-shaving. So I went and got a cortisone injection and got retaped and got myself back in the game. We couldn't win by more than six, so can't win by seven, can't win by eight. And we won by six and covered. I just wanted to get it done.
JIMENEZ: Stevin was getting paid $20,000 a fix by handlers out of Chicago and Vegas. They were making millions of dollars off of just what he was doing.
SMITH: My mother worked hard at Southwestern Bell, 40 plus hours a week.
[20:20:03]
She was making $30,000. In 40 minutes, I got $20,000 cash.
JIMENEZ: And so years go by and he thought he got away with it essentially.
SMITH: When I got called up to the Mavericks, I'm like, oh, they ain't going to mess with me now. I had made it to the NBA. That summer, I was sitting at home, me and my mom, my doorbell rang followed by a knock. There was two FBI agents. And I knew then I'm going to jail.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One of the most significant sports bribery conspiracies involving college athletes in the country.
SMITH: My mother asked me a question, where did she go wrong in raising me? And I had to let her know, mom, it wasn't you. You did your job. The decision that I made down there, that was on me. That had nothing to do with you. Not only was my dream shattered. Hers too. What's done in the dark will come to light.
JONES: There was a very clear understanding for the majority of the 20th century that sports gambling was something that should be left in the shadows, that it was an immoral activity and a dangerous activity.
LEE: In 1992, there was a Gallup poll that showed that the majority of Americans were not in favor of sports gambling. 25 years later, that number had flipped. And the reason that changed was this larger cultural shift that happened within sports.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: March Madness. Plenty of fans who have more than a rooting interest at stake, they've put a couple of dollars on the line.
JIMENEZ: The big thing with March Madness outside of the basketball itself is the bracket. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: An estimated $3.5 billion is bet on the
tournament, and many people bet in pools that are run online.
BARACK OBAMA, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: I will post this on the internet.
LEE: Filling out March Madness brackets, I think, was a slow ramp-up into people feeling more comfortable with the idea of gambling.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Fantasy Football has become a popular pastime around the nation.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Two wide receivers, two running backs, tight end, and two flex. That's OK.
JONES: Daily fantasy sports is considered a game of skill, not a game of chance, therefore, it is not gambling even though it feels a lot like gambling.
FRANZESE: Today, it's part of our culture. It wasn't part of our culture back then.
SMITH: With the way everything is today, you got kids that can be real vulnerable. And all it takes is somebody to reach out to you and catch you at the right moment. Next thing you know, you're hooked.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:27:27]
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When you think about how much is now going into sports, in college basketball.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All these athletes can be paid for their name, image, and likeness, otherwise known as NIL.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's changing the face of the college sport.
JONES: This is the era where we went from players getting paid nothing to many players legitimately making millions of dollars to play college basketball. But there's still large groups toward the middle and at the bottom of the distribution who receive little to no money for participating in college athletics.
JIMENEZ: Now, it's a little bit more complicated. Ironically, one of the things this is doing is it's creating a class of haves and have- nots, a lot like it was in the early days of the NCAA. In the 1950s, the NCAA coined the term student athlete.
JONES: The goal in the beginning was to maintain college athletics as a game for college athletes.
JIMENEZ: And they were trying to preserve that amateurism that we have grown to know for decades now.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Final for the National Collegiate Basketball title.
JONES: And that tenet of amateurism was the idea of keeping a purity behind the NCAA that this was not a business.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The defending champion, Kansas University Jayhawks opposed Indiana.
JONES: You were not allowed to pay players. In the early days, you weren't even allowed to give them scholarships.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's the ball game. Jubilant Indiana wins the NCAA 69-68.
JIMENEZ: Unions collective bargaining agreements, those are critical protections that don't exist.
LEE: It was free labor. And this became a multibillion dollar industry.
JONES: You had a landscape where literally everybody involved with college athletics was making money, except for the people who played.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: There's a new deal tonight to keep March Madness on CBS, and the price is as staggering as a half court bomb at the buzzer.
JONES: Once we get to the 1990s, the NCAA is signing contracts with CBS that are worth literal billions.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: For a game played by amateurs, $6 billion is no small score.
LEE: That's how March Madness became what it is today.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The NCAA's deal with CBS is recognition. The men's college basketball tournament is among the elite sporting events. But student athletes say they deserve more.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: College athletes receive a scholarship but no wages.
JONES: Even when all the players were white, they were willing to exploit white people very clearly.
[20:30:02]
But now it's hard to ignore the fact that the people that make the most money are white, and the majority of the people that you see on the court are black.
LEE: Sports is a reflection of the racial inequities in the United States. There has been these teams with a lot of largely black athletes coming from lower income backgrounds, and this has been their ticket out.
SMITH: Back in my day, we didn't have no NIL. We didn't have nothing. We just had a little scholarship check. I was getting like $670 once a month. I couldn't live off that. No.
JIMENEZ: But what's interesting is over time that would change.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: The Supreme Court said today the nation's student athletes could receive payments.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: For the first time ever, a new agreement will allow for schools to pay players directly.
JIMENEZ: All of a sudden, you can start making money off of your name, image, and likeness, your NIL.
JONES: NIL simply became a way to pay the players.
EDWARDS: Most of your money is going to come from direct revenue share, the base salary for college players. The school is like paying you. And then an NIL is more of like brand deals from outside sources, whether it's like Raising Cane's and things like that.
BOOGIE FLAND, BASKETBALL PLAYER: I'm Boogie Flynn and I run the court with Raising Cane's.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What's good? I just came here with my dream pizza from Domino's.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What's up, everybody? It's Tarris Reed. We're here at CVS.
CHARLIE BAKER, PRESIDENT, NCAA, FORMER GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS: I don't know what the total number will be at the end of the year, but it's probably somewhere between half a billion and a billion dollars in NIL.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's the Wild, Wild West. This is the Wild West.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Wild West.
MIKE MAGPAYO, HEAD COACH, FORDHAM UNIVERSITY: The simple fact is, the players are getting paid now.
Here we go. Here we go. Reps, reps, reps.
MAGPAYO: On top of their scholarship. And sometimes, they're getting paid more than your staff. So it's professional sports. Like it just is.
Fellas, let's go. Play ball.
It's 30 plus hours a week.
Finish!
Five to six practices a week.
Free throw box out, play leg. Keep it rolling.
Training room beforehand and after hand. The way you counter physicality and athleticism is fundamentals. And
that's what we've done all year long, fellas.
Then you're doing film work.
Good job creating extra possessions for us, making up a few mistakes.
It's a full-time job and just the money that's involved now. Players are going to ask, what is my potential NIL package going to be? How much money can they make here?
JIMENEZ: When you look at the landscape of college sports over the last five or six years, there are two major changes. One is NIL. And the other is --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The transfer portal, where athletes jump from school to school.
EDWARDS: So the transfer portal is a database.
SANDERS: Basically, guys can leave their schools, put their names into like a bubble where any available coaches can see who they are, if they're a fit for their team.
EDWARDS: I put my name in the transfer portal. I was getting calls in the next 10 minutes. These coaches do a good job like being on it.
SANDERS: I answered it while in the dining hall of my school after I texted my athletic director. And then about an hour later, I got a couple e-mails from different schools. And I was kind of like, oh, this is, this is real. This is how this works.
MAGPAYO: You can basically make yourself a free agent to all the colleges out there, and you can do it as many times as you want. Student athletes have agents now.
PONEMAN: What's up, bro?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I wanted him to know that you're my agent. And from there, I guess kind of start those types of discussions.
PONEMAN: I'll get on and see what their opening offer is. There are some good spots, mid-major spots on the West Coast that will have $100,000, $150,000 for a guy like you. In the past few years, portal season has been a level of intensity that few can fathom.
Because they might spend $10 million on the roster. If LSU steps up and says, yes, we got 500, 600, 700, let's rock and roll. I've already got 30 missed calls and 100 texts. Whatever happens in March magnifies it by five times because everyone's watching. Let the games begin.
How many of my players will transfer during their college career? Definitely more than half.
What up?
EDWARDS: What up, Dan?
PONEMAN: Yes, how's it going over there?
EDWARDS: Having an agent is very common in today's landscape of college basketball because of how it's kind of tough to do alone.
PONEMAN: I have the utmost confidence and faith that you're going to succeed on the professional level, too.
EDWARDS: I appreciate it, for real. People think I've hit the gold mine time of basketball and college. I feel like it's a blessing that it's all went down like this, and I don't take it for granted.
PONEMAN: For some guys, money is the most important thing. For others, it's I want to go to the final four, play on a top 25 team. For others, it's about the education.
[20:35:03]
SANDERS: Columbia offered me a better scholarship package. I landed with Columbia because they would have Ivy League education with my name. I feel like that'd be awesome. It's a step up because there's Division I.
EDWARDS: Providence is in the big east, so really highly touted school. The schools are a lot bigger at the high major level. Probably have a lot more revenue coming in and giving back to the players.
MAGPAYO: We're not going to be at the level of the highest majors in our spending. We're the mid-majors, so we're going to be somewhere in the middle of the pack. We don't have as many resources, so we have to be really strategic.
All right. This program, the reason why we closed strong is you got to stay hungry for it. You got to stay hungry. You got to come out here, and we still got to get ourselves right.
We have somebody on our team, a student athlete, who's able to now help his family. Social mobility of a basketball student athlete who comes from nothing earns a scholarship, boom, check, earns a degree, check, and then now is able to earn NIL money, that's huge. And that can really change a young man's fortunes.
Good job. Good job. Good job. Us on three. One, two, three. Good job.
EDWARDS: I have the ability to not only take care of myself, but take care of my loved ones as well. You're in the gym all day, you're in practice, you're in film. Like, it's really tough for me to even call my family. My mom means everything to me. I saw her make the impossible possible. I just hope that financially helping them a little bit. Basketball can change all their life.
PONEMAN: Anyone who thinks that's a bad thing, or that we shouldn't be ruining the integrity of the amateurism at the expense of these 40, 50 guys that just we're seeing every year signing contracts for generational cycle-busting amounts of money, I'll tell those people to go (EXPLETIVE DELETED) themselves.
JIMENEZ: There are a lot of players making a lot of money, but the vast majority of players are not making millions of dollars. And what it's done is it's left athletes in those positions a lot more vulnerable. You kind of see the incentive structure to where we ended up.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Another betting scandal rocking college basketball.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's mostly very small, mid-majors.
EDWARDS: I never like condoned somebody fixing a game or like intentionally losing the game. Like that's not right. But at the same time, they might really feel like they need this money to get by. They find a way to kind of rationalize with it, which is I'm doing it for my family, or I'm just going to do it one time to get some money.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They preyed on the vulnerable. They preyed on the guys making $30,000 a year, not the guys making $300,000 a year.
EDWARDS: I have never been approached about fixing a game. I don't even engage in conversations like that because I've already heard the horror stories that it can lead to.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:42:30]
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sports betting is exploding in the U.S.
LAURA COATES, CNN ANCHOR: And this is not your grandparents' betting world.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In such a short amount of time, for a lot of Americans, gambling has become the default way of engaging with sports.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And estimations are that as many as 20 percent to 40 percent of American adults have placed at least one bet on sports.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm going to have a heart attack.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So you --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm going to have a heart attack.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You've won how much?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I didn't do the numbers. I think it's close to two million.
JONES: People tend to look at the legalization of gambling in the same vein as the legalization of marijuana, when a much better comparison is cocaine. We have made it very, very easy for you to get on this thrill ride that is gambling. JIMENEZ: When I was growing up, betting was seen as don't get anywhere
near it. You fast forward, and 2018 Supreme Court case, "Murphy versus the NCAA" was really the one that opened the doors.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Breaking news. The Supreme Court this morning striking down the federal ban on sports betting.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It means that some kind of legalized gambling can spread quickly online and to dozens of states.
LEE: This was opening a Pandora's box for sports gambling in the United States.
FRANZESE: I knew that was trouble. I said, they're going to open this up. Everybody's going to be gambling. Players are going to get in trouble. And it was prophetic in a way, but it was just common sense from somebody that knows.
JONES: All of this comes together with an explosion in technology that is the gambling app. You no longer have to go to a window. You no longer have to find a bookie. The casino is in your pocket. It's got lights, it makes noises, and it shakes you to be like, hey, you want to gamble on something right fast?
BAKER: When I was governor, we legalized sports betting in Massachusetts. But I'm telling you, the phone has changed everything. This idea that you would be able to do all of this by yourself on your phone in your bedroom or your dorm room was a completely foreign concept. Now call us all naive and stupid. We probably were.
[20:45:03]
JIMENEZ: The numbers don't lie here. I mean, you look over the course of last year, the sports betting industry hit almost $17 billion.
JONES: Now there is a commercial at every turn for a gambling entity.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A chance for you to win big.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: DraftKings is the place to bet on NBA stars this season.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Bet all your favorite player props on FanDuel. And now --
JONES: So a prop bet is a bet on a specific part of an individual player's performance.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're here for DraftKings taking a look at some of the best prop bets available to you here.
JIMENEZ: Prop bets for basketball are so popular because there are so many combinations of things that can happen.
JONES: For example, if LeBron James is playing in a game, there will be a prop bet set at maybe 25 points. You can bet on whether or not he will score more than 25 points or fewer than 25 points. That is a prop bet. And that will come up on all kinds of different statistics, whether it be points, rebounds, assists, how many times he's going to trip over his shoelaces. Just about anything is on the board.
LEE: Since sports gambling becoming legal, we've seen more sports gambling scandals emerge in pro sports.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The NFL has banned Atlanta Falcons star Calvin Ridley for gambling, including on his own team?
KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: San Diego Padres player facing a potential lifetime ban for allegedly betting on baseball.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You can't bet on NFL games if you are a current NFL player!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's harshly clear.
JONES: The vulnerability is not just the poor and the downtrodden. Even the filthy rich can get caught in this. It is a very dangerous pastime to engage in without a significant level of responsibility.
So I worried about what would happen with gambling getting so close to college sports immediately just because of an understanding of young people.
BAKER: Prop bets in college sports are just a bad idea for a lot of reasons. The biggest one being the pressure it puts on kids on campus.
SANDERS: After the game that we had this year at UConn, a few of my teammates got texts as well as myself. You hurt our spread. I hope you tear your ACL.
EDWARDS: I have been approached about gambling, small things that typically are dangerous as they can lead into bigger things. Somebody can say like, hey, is so-and-so playing today? Or how are you feeling today? You think you're going to score this amount of points? You think you're going to do this today? And things like that are just red flags, and I picked up on.
BAKER: You know, when you have over half the kids on campus betting on college sports, the position you put young people in is extraordinary in terms of the pressure that they feel from their classmates to, quote-unquote, "help them out."
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Good play. Good play. Here we go.
JONES: So what the NCAA won't do is allow their games to be used as promotional vehicles. You're not going to see commercials for gambling in an NCAA tournament game, which is a big shift from what you will see in professional sports.
BAKER: Look, I think the NCAA's position on sports betting has always been pretty clear, which is don't do it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let's go, let's go, let's go. PONEMAN: So there's one athlete that my staff recruited. Player chose
not to sign with us and chose to go back to the school he was at, presumably to make very little money if anything. Well, news broke recently that that player was caught up in this point-shaving, game- fixing scandal.
JON DUNCAN, VP OF ENFORCEMENT, NCAA: Deep into 2025, we were aware of the scheme. We were aware of the student athletes involved.
PONEMAN: When I saw that, I felt sick to my stomach. If he had just signed with me and moved to a different school that could have paid him a half a million dollars, he wouldn't have needed to put his whole career at risk to take money under the table for some gambler.
DUNCAN: For NCAA purposes alone, we monitor more than 20,000 contests every year. That's in addition to all of the other monitoring done by other leagues and conferences. We've got all manner of tools available to watch performance, to watch lines, to watch communications. It's hard by itself to determine whether somebody is throwing a game or just having a tough day.
We go beneath that to look at text messages, interviews, other documents to suggest or show that there was an agreement to manipulate the performance in any way.
[20:50:01]
BAKER: There's nothing to celebrate when the NCAA discovers that somebody has been cheating, underperforming, you know, betting on their own performance.
DUNCAN: It's tough to be in a room with a student athlete and confront that student athlete with evidence of their own misconduct.
JONES: All of this is much easier to do than ever, but it also is much easier to get caught engaging in shenanigans. But there's more room for a little bit of temptation for everybody than there has ever been before.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
JONES: There was no way that the explosion of gambling was not going to result in a gambling scandal. I don't even think that this most recent gambling scandal is the tip of the iceberg.
PAULA NEWTON, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR AND CORRESPONDENT: And now prediction markets have entered the fray.
LEE: There are two main prediction markets in the game. That's Kalshi and Polymarket.
[20:55:05]
They take in literally billions of dollars in trades.
JIMENEZ: A prediction market is buying into a particular outcome. There's no house to bet against. The house is the world itself.
JONES: The predictive markets become dangerous because you can bet on anything.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Kalshi lets you legally trade on anything anywhere in the U.S.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Will the U.S. confirm that aliens exist?
NEWTON: The winner of the English Premier League.
LEE: How many acres would burn in the L.A. wildfires? Is Nicolas Maduro going to be able to finish out his term as the president of Venezuela?
BAKER: No one was expecting you'd be betting on every little micro event. There's a loophole here that's going to have to get closed.
JONES: It's not a gamble. It is a prediction, which implies you are using a measure of skill in order to do it, which means you can evade a lot of the regulations around gambling.
LEE: Because prediction markets are federally regulated, they can operate in states that don't have legal sports gambling.
BAKER: But 90 percent of the bets on there are about sports. They are, for all intents and purposes, about sports betting.
JIMENEZ: I think regulation is trying to catch up with the speed in which these markets are growing, and the speed has been pretty fast.
JONES: You only need to be 18 to engage in it. More opportunities to create more vulnerable people, more ways for people to lose their money.
JIMENEZ: And there are now news companies that are working with some of these prediction markets. You got CNBC. You've got Associated Press. You've got CNN as well.
HARRY ENTEN, CNN CHIEF DATA ANALYST: According to Kalshi, look at this, a 77 percent chance.
BAKER: I think as long as we live in this world, we're always going to have a challenge. Look, I know that a lot of people bet on March Madness. I think one of the things we've done a lot about over the last few years is education programming for student athletes.
SMITH: I'm here to educate you guys on gambling harm, to tell y'all a true story. We're going to get out of here. All right?
Education is the key to preventing these scandals from happening. Education, education, education.
Don't get caught up like I did because it's not worth it. Play the game. Don't let the game play you.
DUNCAN: The consequence for NCAA student athletes found to be fixing games is permanent ineligibility.
EDWARDS: It's terrifying hearing the words like permanent banning or permanent ineligibility.
SMITH: It's devastating for a student athlete to receive a ban from the sport that they've been playing all their life. At one time, I felt like I had got a death sentence.
JIMENEZ: There is always a difference when it spills over into breaking federal laws. Now you're looking at federal prison time if convicted.
SMITH: I'm no longer Stevin Smith. I am 01044748. And that's when I held myself accountable. Stop pointing fingers. And I pray and ask God, give me one more chance. I promise you I'll do the right thing. I'm 54 years old. It took me over 25 years to recover. But because of being a convicted felon, couldn't get no job, so it got tough.
I've come a long way. You know. My mom, her last 30 days, I was able to spend a lot of time with her. And she had told me something and I didn't understand what she was talking about. She said, "Son, I want you to make a difference."
Now I'm traveling around the country speaking on the mistake that I made.
You like that shit clean, huh?
EDWARDS: I just can only imagine like how scary it is for these kids to think about like their future now and what they'll have to do to still chase their dreams and even if they'll have the ability to continue to chase their dreams.
JONES: In a lot of ways, we're going to go back and say to ourselves that these young people who got involved themselves are victims because they have absolutely been exploited by people with nefarious intentions.
LEE: So there's so much money involved now that has made sports feel like you're betting on horses. But they're people.
MAGPAYO: They're still kids. But you want them to act like professionals. They're still shaping who they are as a person. Any student athlete that has made it to this level has sacrificed a ton. I just try to share that with these guys. You guys have done an amazing thing to earn this dream and opportunity that you've been working for your whole life. You want to protect that at all costs.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
