SportsBiz: Prop bets raise integrity concerns in sports betting

This article appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of ColoradoBiz under the headline, SportsBiz: Propular Culture.

Betting on sports performance outcomes was supposed to be fun. Now it’s tainted.

By now, you know about the FBI’s November 2025 arrest of the Colorado-bred hoopster Chauncey Billups, who the FBI named as a suspect in an illegal gambling operation tied to (supposedly) rigged poker games taking place in an upscale Manhattan apartment building. (Obligatory stay-out-of-trouble comment: Billups and his attorney publicly denied the charges of money laundering and wire fraud.)

For those of us who marveled over Billups’ on-court prowess with the University of Colorado and the Denver Nuggets (and let’s not forget George Washington High School), it was a heartbreaking moment. But it was a separate, related FBI action announced the same day that drew attention to a broader, more insidious aspect of the modern-day legalized sports betting world. The FBI’s arrest of a prominent NBA player, Miami’s Terry Rozier, trained the spotlight on the “prop bet,” shorthand for a wager on an event or statistical outcome that might take place during a game. In this case, Rozier, who also denied the charges, was pinched for allegedly advising bettors to take the “under” on several individual game performances, and then making sure the prediction came true.

Once an outlier in the world of sports betting, prop bets have quickly risen to become a big-scale moneymaker for sports betting giants like FanDuel and DraftKings.

The idea behind them is entertaining. Will Nikola Jokic end up with more than 26 points against the Wolverines? Let’s fire up our app and bet on it! Will Shedeur Sanders throw more interceptions than touchdowns for the Browns? (Wait: That’s too easy. Of course he will.) Lining up a trio of prop bets in a risky parlay has become a go-to gambit for lots of bettors looking to cash in big.

Prop bets weren’t exactly top of mind when the U.S. Supreme Court effectively said this about legalizing sports gambling in 2018: “Umm. Yeah, sure. What the hey.” Much of the attention at the time revolved around old-school “moneyline” bets, which are fairly limited in scope and less subject to manipulation: Which team will win, for example, or whether the combined scoring output of two teams would exceed an oddsmaker’s “over/under” estimate.

Moneyline bets, once a bread-and-butter moneymaker for illegal bookies, were always subject to malfeasance by nefarious coaches or players. But it’s tricky to influence the outcome of an entire game. Were there occasionally kickers who intentionally botched a game-tying goal for a wad of cash? Most certainly. But moneyline bets remain worlds away from the easily rigged minutiae of seemingly innocuous events.

One poster child in 2025 was the Cleveland Guardians’ fireballing reliever Emmanuel Clase, who has been accused of tipping off gamblers in advance about the qualities of certain pitches he planned to throw. (Let us pause to consider that Clase, who pleaded not guilty to federal conspiracy charges, earned a salary of $4.5 million from the Guardians last year.)

When I first learned about props, I was as smitten as the next guy. An erudite and convincing marketing executive for PointsBet, the online gambling outfit that was briefly headquartered in downtown Denver, it closed shop here after being sold in 2023, assured me prop bets would inject newfound interest into games that otherwise might digress into boring drivel at a certain point. Seemed … interesting.

Now, prop bets are getting the scrutiny they probably should have had all along. The NBA, MLB and NFL have been working with betting giants to trim the edges by limiting bets on specific performance outcomes or the amount of money that can be wagered on a prop bet at one time.

Nobody in a power position is suggesting, though, that we ought to rethink the whole proposition concept. By now, prop bets are deeply ingrained in a legalized sports gambling marketplace that itself is now fully ingrained in the modern sports economy.

In Colorado, bettors wagered more than $8 billion (not a typo, it really is a “B”) on sports action during the latest fiscal year 2024-2025, according to the Colorado Division of Gaming. (My personal favorite metric: $279 million wagered by Coloradans on table tennis.) The total action last year yielded $37 million in tax revenue for the state, which supports water infrastructure and other community-minded projects.

The good news is that in roughly half of these cases, people won their bets. Bookmakers, though, win either way, because they collect a fee on almost every bet, and enjoy an even higher margin on parlays.

Lately, a few prominent people have been wondering whether we did the right thing by opening the proposition betting faucet. Not long ago, U.S. senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) sent letters to the MLB and NBA, demanding explanations of how the leagues plan to protect game integrity in the wake of betting scandals.

It’s a laudable ambition. But let’s get real: the date at which the sports ecosystem will turn tail on its latest moneymaking bounty, legal sports betting generated some $14 billion in total net revenue last year nationally, is the same date pop sensation Donny Osmond sang about in a 1973 remake of an old English folk classic: The Twelfth of Never.