California Won’t Let You Bet on Sports. Its College Athletes Are Harassed by Gamblers Anyway.
No one in the state can wager on a regulated book for a game, but Bruins and Trojans are among the players asking for shelter from gamblers. A gap in federal law could make things worse.
- California offers no regulated sports wagering, yet a nationwide betting market keeps finding its college athletes, and the abuse aimed at players has grown noticeably worse.
- One NCAA study from November 2025 logged betting-linked online abuse against 36% of Division I men’s basketball players, and a follow-up study in February 2026 measured it at 46%.
- The athletes are not staying quiet. In February 2026 the Big Ten’s Student-Athlete Issues Commission, with USC and UCLA members on board, asked the NCAA to curb or scrap wagers on a single player’s performance.
- Just four states, Ohio, Louisiana, Vermont and Maryland, have outlawed individual college prop wagers, and California operates no betting regulator that could order the same.
- The NCAA wants D.C to freeze college prediction-market contracts across the country, the lone product that can legally land in front of California athletes, calling them sports betting stripped of its safeguards.
SACRAMENTO – No state this large keeps sports betting as far away as California does. There is no app to download in Los Angeles, no counter to visit in San Francisco, no legal way to put money on a game, and voters slammed that door shut in 2022. None of it has spared the athletes. The guard suiting up for UCLA and the passer taking snaps for USC swim in the same betting waters as every player in the country, and they absorb the same insults, occasionally the same threats, from gamblers in the many states where it is all perfectly legal. A market California turned away still tracked down its athletes. Now a gap in federal law could make it tougher than ever to fend off.
The Abuse Is Real, and Climbing
The evidence belongs to the NCAA itself, and it is hard to wave away. In a study published in November 2025, the association found that 36% of the men playing Division I basketball had been hit during the prior year with online abuse rooted in wagering, and that 29% had been approached by a classmate who had bet on their squad. Among top-tier football players, 16% reported menacing or hostile messages. A separate NCAA study, out in February 2026, pushed the basketball number up to 46%. Women athletes reported almost nothing comparable, around 1%. The takeaway is not hard to read. The cruelty concentrates on the athletes in the sports with the busiest betting boards.
The Athletes Are Talking, and Some Are Californian
In February 2026 the players themselves dropped the matter on the NCAA’s doorstep. The Big Ten Conference’s Student-Athlete Issues Commission, 22 athletes drawn from each of the league’s 18 member schools, sent NCAA President Charlie Baker a letter pressing him to keep working to curb or do away with wagers staked on one player’s output. Now that the Bruins and Trojans play in the Big Ten, athletes from UCLA and USC are among the names behind that letter. The athletes did not soften it. A prop wager, they told Baker, opens a direct lane to the avalanche of death threats that arrives the moment a player happens to “ruin a parlay.” Where a bet on the final margin tracks the whole team, a prop bet hangs on a lone competitor, the yards a quarterback throws for or the points a guard pours in, and it strands that one person in the middle of a stranger’s gamble.
A Fight Across the States the NCAA Keeps Losing
Since 2023, Baker has been pushing statehouses and regulators to scrub individual college props from the menus, warning they breed both harassment and match-fixing. Little has come back. The NCAA’s own scorecard shows just four states, Ohio, Louisiana, Vermont and Maryland, have gone ahead and prohibited bets on specific college athletes, while a majority of the roughly 39 states with legal books still wave them through one way or another. A few regulators have flatly refused. Missouri’s gaming commission rejected the NCAA’s request in January 2026, its chair explaining she still lacked the information to justify a change. The stakes are not abstract, either. A federal indictment unsealed in January 2026 charged 26 people in a point-shaving scheme that prosecutors said involved at least 39 players across 17 Division I programs, exactly the rot the bans are meant to stop.
California’s Peculiar Blind Spot
This is the point where California’s predicament gets odd. The other states in this fight are setting the rules for a legal market they already run. California has no market to oversee. With voters having said no in 2022 and the tribes unlikely to mount another try before 2028, no state-licensed book is posting college props to begin with, and no California regulator holds the power to forbid them. The state’s attorney general bolted one more door in 2025 by ruling daily fantasy contests unlawful under California gambling laws. Left over is everything beyond the state’s grasp: offshore operators, the out-of-state books aiming squarely at its players, and, more and more, prediction platforms. A college athlete in California can be tormented over a bet the state never blessed and can do little to shut down.
The Hole in Federal Law
That final avenue is the one robbing the NCAA of sleep, and it cuts right through California. Prediction platforms, where users buy and sell yes-or-no contracts on things that have not happened yet, report to the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission instead of to any statehouse. They run coast to coast, California among them, and they have charged into sports. On January 14, 2026, Baker pressed the CFTC to halt every college-sport contract on those venues until genuine protections exist, among them age floors, surveillance for suspicious trading, and a prohibition on prop-style contracts. The heart of his argument is that these things are wagering in disguise, posting the very same outcome, margin and total markets you would find at a sportsbook. The piece he singled out as most dangerous was any contract pegged to one athlete, even to a player’s transfer-portal move, which he cautioned could be ruinous for competitors already swamped with harassment.
He has company. On a single platform, college-game contracts have already moved something like $320 million, and a bloc of 40 states plus Washington, D.C., joined by the NBA, has pressed the CFTC with the same message. The agency has not granted the suspension. Its chairman, Michael Selig, who was sworn in at the end of 2025 and is now the commission’s only sitting member, treats prediction markets as financial products separate from sportsbooks, and the rules his CFTC floated in 2026 would let the contracts keep trading while barring only a few, such as bets on whether a player gets hurt, far short of what the NCAA wanted. California’s tribes tried the courts instead and dropped the opening round when a federal judge declined to shut down California prediction markets operator Kalshi in November 2025.
Where It Goes From Here
There is no neat finish in sight. Rules could come from the CFTC, from a courtroom, or from Congress, and each of those would burn through time the athletes on today’s rosters do not have. Should the tribes’ 2028 measure ever land, it would at last give California a regulated market able to write its own college-prop rules, the very tool missing now. Short of that, the lopsided math stays in place. California is that unusual state where the athletes shoulder every downside of a betting market while the state banks none of the money and wields next to none of the say. For a fuller sense of how the rules here operate, our guide to California gambling maps it out.