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July 5, 2026 / 11:01 AM EDT
/ CBS News
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NCAA President Charlie Baker said he hopes to "dramatically limit" prop betting at the collegiate level and beyond, warning about how the sports betting practice has changed the "character and the culture of fandom," and demeaned student athletes."Go sit in the stands behind the bench at a big time college basketball game, and just listen to some of this stuff that's being directed at the kids who are part of those teams," Baker said in an interview for "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan." The interview was taped on July 1 and aired Sunday. A proposition, or "prop," bet involves placing a wager on an individual player or event that isn't necessarily tied to the final outcome of the game. A bet could involve the number of passing yards or points scored by an individual player during a game, or a wager on a team, like which team will score first. But Baker said student athletes likely have classmates, friends and family members "on a pretty regular basis," asking, "'don't take the first pitch, don't take the first shot, don't catch the first pass. I don't want you to lose the game, but here's all the other things I want you to do, so that I can make money.'""Honestly, it's disgraceful, it's demeaning, and it's incredibly demoralizing for student athletes," Baker said. "And I think we're starting to win this discussion and this debate with the public, and I'm anxious to have a lot of the folks who are part of our community get deeply involved and organized on this one."Baker, who served as governor of Massachusetts from 2015 until 2023, said the NCAA was the first to "really raise the alarm about prop bets.""I started talking about that pretty much as soon as I got the job in the spring of '23 because I heard about it a lot from student athletes, who said the noise and the abuse that they were taking from betters around prop bets was really disturbing," Baker said.
