By: Karl Salkowski
On January 15th, 2026, 10 to 15 Division 1 basketball players were charged with conspiring to rig games. Many of the best college players would throw games while an outside group bet hundreds of thousands of dollars against them. Using this strategy, these players were able to make millions of dollars over the course of the season.
The United States government has attempted to make fixing games harder through legislation, including the 2019 Macolin Convention against manipulation and the 2020 Rodchenkov Act against doping in sports. Sports betting is a lucrative market, as gambling revenue was more than 11 billion dollars last year, up over 13%.
Fixing professional sports is nothing new; major scandals have been happening for centuries. One of the first notable examples was the 1919 Black Sox scandal. 8 Major League Baseball players conspired together to lose the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds in order to receive a payout from a gambling syndicate. This destroyed professional baseball’s integrity and changed the way the sport was run professionally. All 8 players involved were banned from the sport for life, and this event led to many of the stricter rules in baseball.More recently in professional tennis, close to 200 players were proved to have participated in match fixing. In 2023, many lower level professional players would purposely manipulate scores and retire from the game early for betting purposes. Many of these players received fines or lifetime bans from the sport following the investigation.
As sports betting is becoming more and more accessible, there becomes more of an incentive for players to rig games. For the most part, players with lower salaries are more susceptible, as the money is more impactful. This has caused fixing college games to become all too common in the last few years. Even with the strict punishments and the laws in place to prevent it, fixing sports games will only happen more and more often. Not only does rigging games harm the integrity of these sports, but also the betting market.
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