![](\"https:\/\/a.espncdn.com\/combiner\/i?img=\/photo\/2025\/0402\/r1472680_1296x1296_1-1.jpg&w=130&h=130&scale=crop&location=center\")
<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n1 Related<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n
“But it’s complicated, isn’t it?” Metcalf continued. “As we suspect in this case, there are players who were targeted because they were short of NIL money and they were being targeted to supplement their NIL compensation.<\/p>\n
“Whether or not they would commit a specific crime depending on whether other athletes are paid, I don’t know.”<\/p>\n
Metcalf and his colleagues from eastern Pennsylvania, not to mention the FBI, seem to have done an excellent job here.<\/p>\n
Each defendant is presumed innocent in a court of law, but anyone in the court of public opinion who reads the 70-page indictment may agree that the evidence of guilt is strong.<\/p>\n
Too many participants to maintain a conspiracy, too much money bet on obscure games to stay under the radar and way, too many incriminating text messages.<\/p>\n
Some of the athletes may have their priorities skewed due to legalized sports betting and the fact that college athletes can make a lot of money these days with name, image and likeness.<\/p>\n
As Metcalf astutely noted, however, it’s complicated.<\/p>\n
And not an excuse.<\/p>\n
If the allegations in the indictment are true, then every athlete involved willfully violated the recognized rules, principles of natural competition and fundamental obligations of team play that exist from DI basketball down to a random 2-on-2 game in the park.<\/p>\n
You don’t need to get extensive education from the NCAA, speeches from coaches or posters in the locker room to know what’s right and what’s wrong here.<\/p>\n
No one should try to cry that they are a victim of a changing society. The proliferation of gambling apps or the fact that some kid at Duke or Kentucky is making millions doesn’t justify making multiple shot bricks in the first half to get a kickback.<\/p>\n
The NIL is blamed for almost everything in college sports these days. Can we spare you this at least?<\/p>\n
This is about personal accountability. This is about consciously choosing suspected criminal behavior.<\/p>\n
That’s all.<\/p>\n
While it’s easy to slap a player with a lucrative NIL contract, recent gambling scandals have caught NBA and MLB players making millions as well.<\/p>\n
That’s just society — there are more than a few doctors and lawyers and Wall Street types rocking the prison yard.<\/p>\n
And yes, legal sports betting is all the rage these days, in your face everywhere you turn, including ESPN.<\/p>\n
Now?<\/p>\n
Whether legal betting helps or hurts here, in Metcalf’s terms, is complicated.<\/p>\n
The rise of betting shops certainly helps middlemen like Shane Hennen or Marves Fairley to bet big bucks on small games — like $458,000 across most sportsbooks on the 2024 Towson-North Carolina A&T championship.<\/p>\n
In the old days, you had to go into a Las Vegas sports book to place a bet. It would be quickly rejected. Whatever value would be allowed, it probably wouldn’t be worth the reinforcement of the result.<\/p>\n
That said, the ever-increasing integrity efforts of sports books, not to mention sophisticated state and federal regulators, undoubtedly played a role in flagging these schemes and leading authorities to prosecution.<\/p>\n
Shaving with points is not new. It was just a tradition of organized crime to influence illegal, underground betting. That worked mostly in the dark, with no defenses and few prosecutions.<\/p>\n
Legal betting may have made these schemes easier to pull off, but also easier to blow up. We should also serve as a warning.<\/p>\n
This case is not about legal sports betting or NIL deals.<\/p>\n
It’s about, according to the feds, a strange group of game-fixers who convince individual players to selfishly betray their common sense, their education about the rules, their teammates, coaches and parents and the dream opportunity to play scholarship basketball in an effort to make a quick buck.<\/p>\n
They do a lot to chase away the bad guy.<\/p>\n
That part is not complicated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dan WetzelJan 16, 2026, 01:00 PM ET Shut up Dan Wetzel is a senior writer specializing in investigative reporting, news analysis and feature storytelling. After dropping an indictment that led to 26 arrests and opened up a college basketball point-shaving scheme that marred dozens of games over the past two seasons, U.S. Attorney David Metcalf …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2700,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insightresearcher.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insightresearcher.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insightresearcher.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insightresearcher.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insightresearcher.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2699"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.insightresearcher.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2701,"href":"https:\/\/www.insightresearcher.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2699\/revisions\/2701"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insightresearcher.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insightresearcher.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insightresearcher.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insightresearcher.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}