Majoring in Point Spreads

I have a weekly ritual. Every Saturday night, I come home from a party or from hanging out with my girlfriend and head straight for the TV to check the college football scores. I don’t care who won the games. What matters to us gamblers is not who wins or loses, but whether a team covers the point spread.

In my case, all I have riding on Saturday’s point spreads is pride, not money. My gambling is part of a competition among the staff at the USC newspaper, the Daily Trojan, and our picks are printed every week in Friday’s newspaper. If my teams lose, the worst result will be mocking from my classmates.

Real college gamblers, on the other hand, have much more on the line, and college gambling is a lot more widespread than people realize.

Among my friends, almost all of us gamble occasionally on sports. Most of the bets are harmless--small-change affairs between friends. But almost every one of us also has a friend with a serious gambling problem.

My friend “Mitch” is one of them. A typical college student, he’s in a fraternity and is always quick to organize a poker game or a fast trip to Vegas.

Mitch regularly bets $100-plus on college games. After a bad week, it’s not unusual for him to be down more than a grand. He always says he’s going to cut back on his gambling, but he never does.

Another student I know, “Kyle,” is also a routine gambler. On weekends, he handicaps horse races or goes to sports memorabilia shows. But his favorite pastime is betting on college sports. He loves the thrill his gambling brings and the attention he gets because of it. After a big weekend, Kyle is not afraid to take the guys out on the town--his treat. Gambling to Kyle is a way of being social.

Who do they place bets with? It’s easy to find someone. Every college campus has at least a few student bookies. Or someone’s dad is a gambler and can place a bet for you. If you keep winning, there is no problem. But if you lose, the bookies want their money and they won’t take IOUs. If you lose, you owe them what you wagered plus an extra 10%. Everyone ends up losing eventually.

In the past, I had a hard time understanding how someone could be lured into gambling. It seemed so obvious that you were set up to lose money. But since I’ve started picking games for the newspaper, I see how gambling can be addictive.

One group of college kids seems particularly susceptible to the excitement: student athletes.

In recent months, a number of scandals have brought to light that compulsive gambling is common among athletes. Athletes betting a few bucks on the Super Bowl should not be a big deal. But every gambler knows that you tend to gamble on what you know best. If you’re a football player, obviously you’ll tend to gamble on football. Better yet, on football teams you’re familiar with. It’s not that much of a stretch before betting on your own team doesn’t seem like a bad idea.

Pile up a few debts and suddenly “shaving” a few points off the score so your team doesn’t cover starts to make sense.

College sports are supposed to be about school spirit, rivalries and healthy competition. Gambling can destroy all that. If fans can’t trust the fact that the players are trying to win, they can’t trust the game itself.

The NCAA has shown signs of addressing the problem. Many athletes now go through instruction about the dangers of gambling, and the NCAA has set up strict guidelines.

But if colleges really want to address the problem, they need to take on gambling as the broad problem that it is.