Point-Shaving and Policy Failure

4:03 PM, Jan. 23, 2026

Sports bettors beware: point-shaving is still alive and well. This past week, federal officials unsealed an indictment in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania stemming from a two-year investigation into an alleged point-shaving and sports-bribery conspiracy in college basketball. Point-shaving involves the manipulation of team performance to achieve a result which allows bettors with inside information to profit at the expense of outside bettors and non-betting sports fans.

For example, if a gambling website offers a betting line under which a bettor “wins” if Team A beats Team B by more than ten points, a player on Team B could “shave points” by deliberately underperforming to ensure that Team A outperforms the spread. Similar facts are alleged in the indictment, where “fixers” reportedly bribed active college basketball players to manipulate game outcomes in their favor. This latest indictment suggests that recent regulation has failed to curb point-shaving—and may have even exacerbated it.

While sports betting, and, unfortunately, point-shaving have featured in American sports since at least the 1910s (*cough* the 1919 White Sox *cough*), several scholars have expressed renewed concern following recent scandals. In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a 1992 federal law prohibiting states from allowing sports betting. With regulatory authority returned to the states, sports betting has become deeply ingrained in American sports culture: thirty-eight states (plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico) currently offer legal sports betting, thirty of which permit online wagering through smartphone apps or websites.

As a result, nearly anyone in the United States can now place a bet on a sporting event—including those between small college teams which generate low revenue. In response, scholars have begun contemplating how to limit point-shaving conspiracies and restore trust in sports betting markets and the sports themselves. Since 1961, the primary federal deterrent has been 18 U.S.C. § 224, which criminalizes bribery in sporting contests. In addition, individual sports leagues deploy their own policies and procedures to discipline players and teams involved in betting-related misconduct. Together, these mechanisms aim to preserve the integrity of sporting events and betting markets alike.

Despite these measures, researchers estimate that more than thirty NCAA men’s division I basketball games per year involve such corruption. Data suggest that, due to lower opportunity costs, engaging in point-shaving increases as college athletes grow older. As a result, traditional NCAA deterrence policies, such as loss of eligibility, are often ineffective. Accordingly, Shane Sanders, a Syracuse University Professor of Sports Economics & Analytics, has proposed a “behavioral finance policy to further deter point-shaving, whereby players receive a grant (athletic scholarship) that retroactively converts into a market-rate student loan” if the player engages in a point-shaving scheme.

[A]lthough point-shaving schemes long predate the rise of online sports betting, the newfound ease of placing wagers raises a salient question: Is there a causal relationship between the accessibility of betting and the prevalence of corruption in sports?

But deterrence alone is not enough. In a 2012 survey of NCAA division I men’s basketball players, 2.1 percent of respondents reported being “asked to influence the outcome of a game.” Yet, “point-shaving in NCAA Men’s Basketball has been detected in approximately one team-season per decade in recent decades.” College basketball players are “most vulnerable to offers from gamblers . . . when it becomes reality that they are not going to have lucrative careers as players.” With online sports betting platforms offering virtually anyone the ability to wager on small-market teams, where players are unlikely to pursue a professional sports career, the risk of point-shaving may increase in coming years. Notably, of the twenty players named in the recent indictment, none attended a college in one of the “Power 4” conferences.

One possible mechanism to address point-shaving is reducing the accessibility of sports betting by rolling back recent legislation and banning online sports betting, though such measures would likely face significant pushback. The social benefits of sports betting are dubious at best, while point-shaving has been shown to “lower[] the social welfare generated by [sports].” And although point-shaving schemes long predate the rise of online sports betting, the newfound ease of placing wagers raises a salient question: Is there a causal relationship between the accessibility of betting and the prevalence of corruption in sports? Future research should address this question and examine how online sports betting may affect the incidence of point-shaving. If a significant causal relationship exists, legislators must respond accordingly.

Taylor Greeno

Taylor Greeno is a native of Chapel Hill who majored in philosophy at Duke University before attending the University of North Carolina School of Law. Taylor is interested in pursuing a career in criminal appeals. In the fall of 2025, Taylor wrote a Note, published in this journal, titled “Take It Down or Take It Too Far? The Legal Fallout of New Online Takedown Powers[,]” which explores the implications and shortcomings of a new federal law aimed at curbing the spread of deepfake non-consensual intimate imagery.