Three former college basketball players tied to alleged sports betting violations failed to cooperate with an investigation initiated by the national governing body of college sports.
The NCAA announced that three former men’s basketball student-athletes at Eastern Michigan failed to comply with an investigation into potential sports wagering violations.
The three former players, Jalin Billingsley, Da’Sean Nelson and Jalen Terry, are no longer enrolled at Eastern Michigan or with the men’s basketball program. The players also have no remaining collegiate eligibility and faced potential permanent ineligibility.
“When individuals choose not to cooperate—particularly when cases involve potential integrity issues—those choices can and will be met with serious consequences, including prohibitions on athletically related activities, the loss of eligibility and/or being publicly named in an infractions decision,” said the Division I Committee on Infractions.
Active NCAA bylaws prohibit wagering on college sports and sharing gambling-related information with third parties. They previously banned wagering on professional sports.
Monitoring service detects suspicious EMU wagers
Potential sports betting violations at Eastern Michigan were flagged in January by sports betting watchdog Integrity Compliance 360 (IC360), according to an ESPN report.
IC360 detected suspicious wagers ahead of a contest between Eastern Michigan and Central Michigan, leading to notifications sent to the company’s client partners.
IC360 and other monitoring services also notified NCAA enforcement staff about the suspicious wagering, which evolved around the first half point spread for the game.
The monitoring services also looked into the wagering activity for Eastern Michigan’s previous games and identified “abnormal betting activity” for two separate contests that season. As a result, the NCAA launched an investigation.
The three former Eastern Michigan basketball players were notified about the NCAA’s probe and consulted legal counsel before handing over their phones to be “imaged by an enforcement vendor.” Numerous attempts to interview the student-athletes were made after their phones were evaluated with legal counsel later notifying NCAA enforcement staff of their plans to not cooperate with the investigation, a violation of NCAA bylaws.
Legal counsel for the players also asked the enforcement vendor to destroy the images.
NCAA makes a major change to sports betting rules
A group of former NCAA student-athletes failed to cooperate with a sports betting investigation amid recent changes by the organization regarding its wagering rules.
Last week, the NCAA’s Division III Management Council voted to adopt a proposal that lifts the ban on pro sports wagering following approval from DI and DII committees.
The NCAA previously prohibited sports wagering by all student-athletes, coaches and team officials on all events sponsored by the organization, including pro competition.
Active NCAA guidelines mandate punishments for student-athletes and staff who influence the outcome of their own games, wager on or against their own teams or provide gambling-related information to third parties. The punishments range from a potential 50% loss of one season of eligibility to a lifetime ban from NCAA competition.
The NCAA considered the rule change to allow wagering on pro sports as its bylaws “were written and adopted at a time when sports gambling was largely illegal nationwide,” said University of Illinois Athletics Director Josh Whitman.
