
America’s collegiate athletes are facing increased levels of online abuse. The National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) says that is directly correlated with the spread of legal sports betting. This week, it published a new study looking into that claim.
The report, commissioned by the NCAA from sports data firm Signify, looked at public interactions with college athletes’ social media profiles between 2023 and 2024. That included tagged posts, comments, and replies, but not direct inbox messages.
Data analysis found that up to 12% of all abusive interactions detected mentioned betting or wagering in some form. This was the second-highest reported theme of directed abuse, behind sexual abuse at 18%, but above racist abuse at 10%.
Signify said that many abusive posts that didn’t directly mention betting were posted by accounts that had posted about sports betting in other instances, or followed sports betting related accounts.
The study also found that abuse aimed at athletes spiked significantly during the March Madness basketball tournament season. Bot networks were also a reported problem on some social media platforms, directing inappropriate posts at female athletes to promote pornography websites.
The Study
Signify used data analysis software to scrape and categorize tens of thousands of interactions relating to half a dozen major collegiate athletics tournaments, and several smaller events. Those included the College Football Playoffs, the NCAA Division 1 Basketball Tournaments known as March Madness, and the College World Series of baseball.
3,000 college athletes, 500 team staff, 200 event officials, and 165 team accounts were monitored in the study.
Researchers combined their analysis with AI tools to build a clearer picture from the 10,000-plus posts and interactions they looked at. It used posts from X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
The analysis categorized abusive interactions into 12 types, depending on what specific aspect of the player was targeted. Those traits included sports betting and athletic performance-related anger, or abuse aimed at genders, races, and regional rivalries.
It also categorized abusive messages into tiers from zero to three, depending on the seriousness of the message. Some accounts were reported to social media platforms and even the police over their posts.
The Results
The report found that college athletes suffer more online abuse than most professionals in other sports around the world.
Signify said that previous studies have shown around 1,000 to 2,000 abusive interactions were generated during a three- week tennis Grand Slam event. But during March Madness 2024, they identified 4,000 angry social media posts aimed at athletes.
As well as finding losing sports betting anger was one of the key drivers behind abuse, it also said that women athletes received far more abuse. A significant amount of that was sexual in nature.
Around 12% of the total abuse directly mentioned sports betting wagers as a reason behind the abusers’ anger.
“Bitch, you fuck up my Parlay with that missed free throw, can’t wait for you to get smashed,” said one account picked out by Signify in the report.
“You fucked my parlay up, no fuckin’ points at all, really you gay ass cracker bum,” said another.
“I know you in the locker room checking your damn phone. You got one more half do something n***” wrote another angry bettor, tagging a player during a break in play.
Future Moves
The NCAA’s Charlie Baker said he thought that college player prop bets were to blame for some of the increase in abuse. 18 of the 38 legal sports betting states have banned individual player props on college sports.
“I despise the idea that we put these kids in the position where people would expect their individual performance to be more important than the performance of their team,” he said.
Baker has supported expanding this stance into more states. The NCAA has been historically vocal against sports betting. It was the defendant in the 2018 case against the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) that successfully saw the ban repealed, leading to the spread of legal U.S. sports betting.
In this changed world, the NCAA has had to adapt to sports betting. But it continues to try to push to change the parts of the business it sees as damaging to college sports.
“I think it’s important for all of us to work together to try to find ways to mitigate this,” he said.
“I’m not naive enough to think we’re going to make this all go away. But I think we should be willing to work together to come up with ways to help.”

David is an online casino expert who specializes in online slots and boasts over 10 years experience writing about iGaming. He has written for a wide range of notable publications, including eSports Insider and WordPlay Magazine.
David graduated Derby University with a BA Degree in English Literature and Creative Writing.