CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Sports bettors have forced the hand of Jim Phillips, commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Specifically, those gamblers jumping in the direct messages of players and harassing them online, wanting to know if they’re injured as they look for an edge to beat the lines set by Vegas and the sportsbooks.
Beginning this season, the ACC will have a player availability reporting for four sports: football, men’s and women’s basketball, and baseball — arguably the four most popular sports for folks betting on collegiate athletics.
“This decision is directly connected to our ongoing commitment to best protect our student-athletes and our multi-faceted approach to addressing the effects of sports wagering,” Phillips said Tuesday at ACC Kickoff, the conference’s media days for football. “In this case, it would alleviate pressure from entities or individuals who are involved in sports wagering that attempt to obtain inside information about availability from players, coaches, and other staff.”
He later added: “There’s stresses on our student-athletes from individuals that are trying to garner information — and sometimes it’s pretty innocent because they just want to know, they’re a big fan — but other times it really does trickle and lead yourself to the gambling and sports wagering kind of path.”
In 2024, the NCAA released a study that analyzed the social media accounts of 3,000 college athletes and 500 coaches in a variety of sports. The analysis found 743 abusive messages related to betting and 73 percent of them happened during March Madness. Women received 59 percent more abusive messages than men. The NCAA has lobbied to ban statistic-based prop bets for college athletes too.
For basketball specifically, Phillips said that reports will be due from teams one day before games and then updated two hours prior to tip-off. Those reports will be made public on the ACC’s website.
The ACC is the third conference to launch such reports for women’s basketball. The SEC and Big Ten implemented similar policies last season. Reports from the SEC and the Big Ten didn’t list what specific type of injuries players had, but had designations for “out” or “questionable” for every game. Some teams chose to clarify if an injury was a season-long one.
Some coaches can be reserved or even secretive when it comes to discussing injuries and availability with reporters, but Phillips says that none of the coaches in the four sports pushed back on implementing this policy.
“Coaches are hard to change, but when we told them that we were doing it, no one said anything on the call. I don’t know what that meant, other than they were accepting it,” Phillips said. “It’s the right thing. Every coach has to do what they have to do in order to get their team ready, and there’s always gamesmanship, always. That’s been around for 100 years, and it’s going to continue, but it’s the right thing.”
Phillips said that there isn’t a fine structure in place yet for late reports or for coaches being untruthful with those reports.
“We’re still kind of discussing that,” Phillips said of a fine system. “But we’d also like to think that people are going to do what they’re asked to do, and we hope that it wouldn’t come down to that.”
