36% of Division I Men's Basketball Players Report Harassment from Sports Bettors, but No Platform or Regulator Is Accountable for Protecting Them

College athletes, who are unpaid or minimally compensated through NIL deals, face direct harassment, threats, and abuse from sports bettors who lose money on prop bets tied to those athletes' individual performance. A November 2025 NCAA study found that 36% of Division I men's basketball student-athletes reported social media abuse related to sports betting in the prior year, and 4.1% felt physically threatened. Why it matters: athletes receive hostile messages demanding compensation from losing bettors (including Venmo money requests), so student-athletes experience measurable psychological distress that affects their academic performance and mental health, so universities bear the cost of counseling and support services for a harm they did not create, so the talent pipeline for college and professional sports is degraded as athletes or their families opt out of high-profile competition, so the long-term legitimacy of college athletics as a developmental system is undermined by a commercial betting ecosystem that profits from these athletes without compensating or protecting them. The structural root cause is that state regulators license sportsbooks to offer college player prop bets (legal in 20+ states) without imposing any duty of care toward the athletes whose individual performances are being wagered on, creating a system where the people generating the 'content' for the bets bear the risk while platforms and operators capture the revenue.