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Cool Careers in Accounting Ep. 29 - Business Behind the Buzzer: NCAA Championships, Internal Controls, and Betting with Clint Hangebrauck
319 Plays5 days ago
In this foundational interview, Clint Hangebrauck—Managing Director of Enterprise Risk Management and Internal Audit at the NCAA— offers a behind-the-scenes look at how college sports are protected as sports betting grows nationwide. He explains why prop bets heighten integrity and athlete well-being risks, how the NCAA partners on education and monitoring, and what’s being done to address harassment from bettors. Clint also looks ahead to emerging threats like prediction markets and other “gray market” betting alternatives, and why risk management is now central to protecting student-athletes.
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Transcript
Introduction to Clint Huckabrow and NCAA's Integrity Focus
00:00:09
Speaker
everyone, Mike Potenza from Becker Accounting Podcasts. Now before we start this episode, I just want to make an important note. In this episode, you're going to meet my guest, Clint Huckabrow from the NCAA, who deals with college sports betting all the time.
00:00:24
Speaker
But you may be aware that recently a news story was released about some college betting fraudulent activity related to men's college basketball and point shaving and players underperforming for money.
00:00:39
Speaker
Now in this episode, we're not going to get into that story just yet. Why? Because this episode is a foundational episode. Clint and I are going to talk about his role with the NCAA. and the NCAA's approach to integrity, risk, and fraud in college sports. Once you listen to this episode and you understand the foundational components of the NCAA and the controls they have in place, we're going to come back for another episode with Clint, and we're going to dive into the details on what just transpired. It's gonna be a really interesting segment, so please listen to this one first, and then when you hear about my next episode with Clint, you're gonna wanna hear about that one as well.
00:01:23
Speaker
See you then.
Clint's Background and Career Journey
00:01:26
Speaker
Hey, everyone, it's Mike Patanza from Becker Cool Careers in Accounting podcast series. And today I have a really interesting guest. His name is Clint Hunkerbrow. And Clint is the Managing Director of Enterprise Risk Management and Internal Audit at the NCAA. When you hear what he has to work with, you're going to be like really? That's a job? But it's it's so interesting related to one of the hottest things in college athletics, as well as professional sports, and that is sports betting. Somebody's got to set the rules. Somebody's got to oversee what's going on, making sure that things are on the up and up. If let not for a better way to say that. And Clint has his hands all over this. So he's going to share a lot of great information with us today. So Clint, I'd like to welcome welcome you to the show and thank you for being here.
00:02:20
Speaker
Yeah, thanks, Mike. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Great to be with you. I like that. I like that. No one's ever said that before. it's Good job. Good job. All right. We're starting off on the right foot. I love it already. So, Clint, before we jump right into everything you know and really get into the heart and soul of what we want to talk about and your role with the NCAA, give me a little background on Clint. You know where you're from? Where'd you grow up? Give give the audience a little taste about Clint.
00:02:48
Speaker
Yeah, I appreciate the question. So I grew up actually on a horse farm in Sacramento, California. My mother was the lead trainer there was American Saddlebred Horse Farm. And my dad was a construction worker. So I got to spend a lot of time out on the ranch helping my mom with different activities. It's really interesting. We actually lived in a converted water tower on the farm out there. so I had to climb a ladder up into my bedroom and it was probably about 600 square feet total. So really unique upbringing. We were out there until I was about the age of 14. And then we we were originally from the mid Midwest. My parents were so wanted to get back closer to family. So moved to Western Indiana. um for my high school years and then ultimately went to Purdue University where I majored in business management. It was Krannert Business Management at the time. Now it's the Daniel School Business. So had a great college experience at the University of Purdue.
00:03:52
Speaker
And that's a little bit about me. All right. Go Boilermakers, right? That's right. i do have to do a quick little rewind here. You said you lived in a converted water tower. I have never heard that before. And i didn't even know that that is possible. That is wild. Oh, my goodness. But was it ah like ah ah multiple rooms in there? I mean, was there a lot of space in there?
00:04:16
Speaker
It was very small. So picture like a three-story stucco tower, basically. And on the first floor, had a very small kitchen, a bathroom, and ah a small living room. And then you climb up a ladder through a hatch, and that's the bedroom that was shared by my parents and myself. And then on the third story was where the actual water tank itself used to be. And there was screech owls essentially that had inhabited it um over the years. So you wake up in the middle of the night sometime to the sound of screech owls. But yeah, a really, really interesting experience growing up, but I wouldn't trade it for the world. wow
00:04:54
Speaker
So only child. And so you you know you have a hundred acres out on a horse farm to be able to explore and I let your imagination run wild. It was a great upbringing.
00:05:05
Speaker
That's wild. Great story. And never wanted to be like a professional horseback rider or like rodeo or anything like that. yeah You know, I would see my mom, she worked seven days a week, one week. And then the next week she would work six days a week and she would get up at six in the morning and work till, you know, six o'clock, seven o'clock at night, having to feed the horses and train them. And all the different jobs associated with being on a farm. So it was a great experience, but I knew pretty quick it it wasn't necessarily for me. And I was going to look for more of a traditional career path, if you will.
00:05:38
Speaker
Wow. All right. Well, you do that. You move to the Midwest. You know, you've got a great education at Purdue. you know, it's a fantastic school. yeah Well, I know you then get your first job and whatever career path you have ultimately led you to where you are at the NCAA. But give me an idea, you know, once you graduate, what types of roles did you have and did you work in private corporations, public companies, public accounting? You know, what was your professional road path?
00:06:10
Speaker
Yeah, you know, so, so I was a first generation college graduate and so it really wasn't clear to
Building NCAA's Internal Audit Function
00:06:17
Speaker
me exactly what I wanted to do from a career standpoint. So actually, while I was at Purdue, I got a store management internship with Walmart.
00:06:26
Speaker
um And so there was a local store in West Lafayette that I was able to go to and um kind of train and learn to but to be a manager a few days a week. And that was a really good experience. And so as I was graduating college and trying to look at the job market and understood understanding you know what direction I wanted to go in really Walmart approached me and said, hey, there's this audit function that we have. And it's based out of different offices across the United States.
00:06:55
Speaker
And essentially, you'll get to travel around and anywhere there's Walmart stores, which turns out pretty much every small town in America across the country and, you know, globally now has as a store. um And so you get a chance to you know, travel and exposed to a lot of different business functions and processes. And so it sounded really interesting to me. So I started out in there. Indiana office based out of Seymour, Indiana. But really shortly after I started, they were opening a new office that was based in Eugene, Oregon. And so I moved out to Eugene and then basically, i don't know how they do it now. This was 20 years ago, but every Walmart in America has a physical inventory once a year.
00:07:42
Speaker
And they would send in two auditors such as myself and then about 100 crew members that literally count every single item in the store. And so we would always joke around. We're almost like the circus coming into town counting all of these items within a Walmart in a single day. And then our responsibility was to look at the inventory numbers, reconcile that with the actual books of the Walmart. And at the end of the day, we would deliver those inventory results to the store manager and other associates. So let me ask you a question just now. I just want ask you question. Imagine 100 people doing all this counting and you're going from city to city, store to store. What was your accuracy rate with respect to the inventory counting? Like, would you say they were usually on average 30% off? They were 5% off? Like how accurate is the whole inventory system?
00:08:35
Speaker
Oh, you know, we would get it down to less than a percent. I mean, typically, like the inventory shrinkage, as as we would call it, was less than like half of a percent typically. And that was sort of poor results that you were sharing with the store. So, you know, that's one of the things that made Walmart grow so so quickly is that they just have a very sophisticated, very accurate inventory system.
00:08:58
Speaker
That's how they could ship items in time really quick to get out to customers and um always you know have good in stock when you go to a store for the most part. So, you know, we would do these physical inventories, but it was around the time when Sarbanes-Oxley had passed. So there was a lot of opportunities for us as auditors to go to their home offices based in Bentonville, Arkansas as well, and and get involved in learning about all different types of processes at the home office level.
00:09:25
Speaker
whether that was real estate or construction or accounting or finance or IT. t um There's just a lot of
NCAA's Sports Betting Risk Management
00:09:32
Speaker
exposure. And so that that's really almost where my love in the profession started to to begin is just saying, wow, there's such a broad scope of you know traveling to all these different school stores or going you know to the home office and learning about all these different functions. And started to get involved in some special projects. So one of the interesting things when I was with them again, this was at the time 20 years ago, but Walmart had what they called loss prevention type um roles as well. and And their job was really to be responsible with preventing
00:10:07
Speaker
things being stolen from stores. And so when we were in the off season, we weren't traveling to all the different stores. I would start to do special projects in collaboration with the loss for loss prevention division. And one of those projects was in Oregon. They basically sent me out And my job was to try to steal as much stuff as possible from a Walmart in a given day. So you would picture like you walk in, you're trying to be a little bit discreet. You grab your shopping cart and you go to electronics or tire lube express or whatever it may be, and just fill up the cart with as much stuff as you can and see, you know, can I push that out the right front door? Can I push out the left front door? Is there a back door that's open that I could, Get get out of them, but you know, it's really something that still inform my career today is like You know as auditors you think you have these control systems in place and you may be doing standard um Design testing standard assurance testing on the control, but if you could literally just stress test the transaction Can I just walk right through the doors with this stuff and is anybody gonna stop me like you know, it's a It's a really validating way to see at the end of the day is the control working or not. So really interesting. Can I just ask you a question there? Can I ask you a question? I find this so interesting. So you have a shopping cart full of stuff. You're trying to walk it through different doors.
00:11:36
Speaker
What percentage of the time would you get out? And then the times when you got caught, for lack of a better word, what do you say to the person? Yeah. So I i would say, i don't know if I was just good at it or what, but I would probably get out the doors at least half of the time with thousands and thousands of dollars worth of merchandise from a Walmart store. And a lot of it was just walking with purpose and you walk up to the greeter or whoever it may be and wave your hands as you walk out the door with the stuff. So, it it you know, it it really was um just just sort of a shocking experience that,
00:12:12
Speaker
You know, people are trained not to allow this to happen. And still, you could just walk right out the door and nobody's going to end up stopping you. And when you got stopped, what'd you say?
00:12:23
Speaker
So when I got stopped, we would have our official credentials on. So we had the Walmart corporate badge. And so we would pull that out and say, I'm Clint Hunkerbrown with the internal audit team based out of you know Eugene, Oregon. We're here doing ah ah loss prevention test. And we've identified these items. But even if we got out this out of the store, then we would walk back in and we would have a conference with the store manager and any assistant managers. And we're able to show them like, You know, we just got out of your store with $5,000 worth of merchandise or whatever it may be. And here's how we did it. And then they use that as a training exercise, educational opportunity to go back to those controls and safeguards that they had in place and hopefully enhance them.
00:13:11
Speaker
Okay. So um I just have to take a time out of here. This is a public service announcement to our audience. We do not condone shoplifting in any way, shape, or form. That's right. Do not try this at home on your own. Clint was a professional.
00:13:22
Speaker
All right. All right. And I imagine now with technology and everything else, there's all sorts of you know advanced controls. But again, I think it just shows the importance of like... you know, whatever control systems you think you have in place, you got to be stress testing those and um making sure indeed they're they're actually working.
Regulation and Fair Play in Sports Betting
00:13:42
Speaker
Okay. So how many years you at Walmart and then where do you go next? Yeah, so I was at Walmart for approximately four years and they were consolidating a lot of our internal audit jobs to the corporate offices in Bentonville, Arkansas.
00:13:57
Speaker
Bentonville, Arkansas is a wonderful place and there's all kinds of great things to do there, but it wasn't for me and I was really looking to get closer to to home in the Midwest.
00:14:09
Speaker
And so i got an opportunity to join the risk consulting group at a firm called Crow. it was Crow Chizik at the time. Now they just go by Crow and work within their risk consulting group as a senior based out of Indianapolis, Indiana.
00:14:25
Speaker
And that that was just this such an an incredible opportunity working in public accounting. Because now instead of just working for one organization, there is just so many projects that you would be a part of, whether that's, you know, working in pharmaceutical or construction or airline industry from public accounting or public firms to private firms. And so Really just the breadth of projects and and the breadth of just different processes and things that you were learning about really helped me to grow as a professional. And Crow had a role, a policy at the time that in order to get promoted from senior staff to a manager within their risk consulting group,
00:15:12
Speaker
you had to have your certified internal auditor exam passed. And so, you know, that was really when I started studying for the CIA exam. And and I'll just say that was, for me, very empowering because, you know, you've you've done all these different audit projects on, you know, from store inventories to learning about different processes to being out at different clients. But oftentimes you're just focused at the task at hand.
00:15:39
Speaker
and And that really opened my eyes to like, wow, there's a real profession behind this with real standards. And a lot of the things that, you know, I do on a day to day basis, there's purpose and meaning behind them. And so, you know, studying and and passing the CIA exam was such a a big moment for me when I was at Crow. Shortly after that, I got promoted to manager and spent about four years at Crow. And then,
00:16:07
Speaker
um I had ah a local company in Indianapolis. It's a huge pharmaceutical firm that I was spending most of my time serving them from a client perspective. But we were simultaneous to that. We were doing some work with the and NCA's accounting function and looking at their are accounting processes and accounting controls. And I thought, man, that would be really cool to be on that project, to get to spend some time at the NCAA headquarters and see how sort of things work behind the scene. And so I i talked to the senior manager that was leading that engagement.
00:16:43
Speaker
said, hey, if an opportunity ever comes up that I could go over and even you know help in any capacity on this project, I'll do whatever you want. I'll you know scan documents all day long if you need me to.
00:16:55
Speaker
And it just so happened one of the leads on the project was going to be out for a couple months. And so he said, why don't you come over for a few weeks? we We're just finishing up looking at balance sheet reconciliations and journal entry controls and some of your kind of standard financial controls, if you will. And I said,
00:17:13
Speaker
Okay, that sounds great. awesome And so, yeah, went over, helped out out on the project for a few weeks and got to meet the director of accounting and the CFO and a lot of the key personnel at the NCA. And, you know, I liked them a lot.
Impact of NIL Payments and Emerging Tech Risks
00:17:27
Speaker
I liked the the mission a lot and they seemed to like me okay as well. So shortly after that, ah the the and NCA really wanted to create their first internal audit function. And and that's when I came over to the organization to do do just that about 15 years ago.
00:17:43
Speaker
All right. Fantastic. So just so I understand, that's ah that's a lot to digest here. And it's really interesting stuff. So you're at Crow. you with basically a public accounting firm, but you're focusing on internal audit. You get your CIA. And shameless plug, that's how Clint and I met, because we're a partner of the IIA who administers the CIA exam. And Clint is writing a lot of the content and for us as far as the prep goes for on becoming a CIA. So we always appreciate that, Clint. And he does such amazing stuff and the insights he has and these real world examples, just really, really interesting. And obviously, NCAA is one. So just give me an idea.
00:18:19
Speaker
How long were you a crow in this in this role before you switch to the NCAA? And then just tell me, what exactly is the NCAA? Can you give like ah you know some perspective on what the NCAA actually does?
00:18:34
Speaker
yeah so i was at crow for approximately four years two years as a senior staff and as i mentioned i passed the cia and jumped into the manager role and i could have stayed at crow forever i mean as really engaging organization i loved serving clients i loved you know just every day is different you're always doing something new and and um you know it's really really exciting times in the profession as well with Sarbanes-Oxley and everything that was happening from a regulatory standpoint. But ultimately, you know a lot of the client service work that you do is that you know you go in, you do a project, you hand it off, you hope it's going to work, but then you're off and gone and onto the next project and you go don't get to necessarily see it through. So I was really wanting to have sort of more ownership of the work and see that, you know, real ah life impact that I was having on the organization. So after those four years at Crow, that's when I came to the NCAA.
00:19:33
Speaker
And to answer your question on who the NCAA is, so, you know, I do think we're ah we're an organization that um is oftentimes confused, or maybe people think it's, you know, just March Madness, or it's it's just college football, or,
00:19:50
Speaker
You know, a few schools that are part of it or whatever, but the NCA is an amazing organization that supports over half a million student athletes that compete across 19,000 different and NCA teams that we have across different sports.
00:20:10
Speaker
um we have you know i've heard you talk about it on the show before we have three different divisions division one two and three has you know very large public schools that are a part of that to very very small private schools and so it's just this huge ecosystem of um young people that get this incredible opportunity to be able to go to college and pursue becoming ah a student and then ultimately a professional, but also at the same time get to pursue a world-class athletics experience. So it's a phenomenon like no other that we see anywhere in the world, really. We have other countries that come over and meet with us and like, how have you built this incredible system that um millions of people get to enjoy? um across college athletics but it's also ah unbelievable opportunity for for scholarships um there's ah over four billion dollars per year in scholarships that's handed down to um competing student athletes so just just what a amazing experience to be a part of but so then i work at the ncaa national office we're based out of indianapolis indiana
00:21:25
Speaker
and our core functions are really we manage 91 championships that happen and that's you know from march madness and men's a women's college world series and division one women's volleyball championship and some of these that are very visible to division three women's rowing championships and track and field and golf championships that are happening so just just these incredible different championships of all shapes and sizes and, and you know, scopes involved. and And then we really govern and regulate intercollegiate athletics. So we have groups here that and interpret the rules. We don't make up the rules. It's really our 1100 member institutions that do that. But somebody needs to interpret those. Somebody needs to enforce those. We also have about 200,000 incoming prospective student athletes that are looking to become student athletes. And we have an eligibility center that certifies those incoming student athletes and set them sets them up on the right path. So that that's sort of the work that we do at the NCAA. It's this and incredibly large name, but really it's 500 staff, mostly based out of Indianapolis, that um that really do the the hard work behind the scenes to support our half a million student athletes.
00:22:43
Speaker
Wow. And, you know, 500 sounds like a lot, but it's not really a lot. When you think about the 500,000 students, you support all the different, you know ah varieties of sports and the number of institutions and eligibility and championships. It really sounds like a lot. So hats off to you and, you know, the organization for all that you
Cultural Impact of Sports Betting on College Sports
00:23:03
Speaker
do.
00:23:03
Speaker
But my question is this. You have a couple of years, four years or so at Walmart, another four years at Crow. You're certified in internal audit. You have all this experience in internal audit. Now you're bringing it into a totally different realm, you know college athletics. And we're dealing today with...
00:23:22
Speaker
Oh, everything related to betting, right? All of this now legalized betting on all of this. So what are the skills that allow you to perform your role that you have based on your experience in your prior roles? And how do you, you know, parlay that into, you know a successful career with the NCAA? Yeah.
00:23:44
Speaker
yeah i'll take it as no pun intended by parlay and question it with you said it not me but but yeah so maybe just talking really quickly about my career and then that'll get me to the focus that i have around sports betting today at at the ncaa so like i came in 15 years ago i really spent the first three four years building the first internal audit function that we've ever had and um Really took a purist view. We should have this unique reporting relationship to the audit committee separate reporting functionally to them versus management and focus on all of our risks from financial to operational to strategic, et cetera, et cetera, and start building audits from there. So.
00:24:29
Speaker
Luckily, had really good top down support from our board and our senior leadership to build the function as a function of one. um So certainly small but mighty, but had a lot of help from some of my friends in public accounting. We would bring in different firms for different work as well. And that that was going great. But I've always viewed it as.
00:24:49
Speaker
You know, never never turn away from opportunities that may present themselves. It's kind of like the version of of luck, right? It's when preparation meets opportunity. So try to be lucky, try to be fortunate as you go through your career. So we actually had a situation within our enforcement department, which conducts investigations of college campuses who have allegedly broken NCAA rules where our our member institutions were really wanting to build more of like a quality control function within that group that would help the um department make sure that they were consistent across the board, try to speed up investigations, try to figure out how to use data analytics to understand trends and issues in more depth, which really like grew into a deep love of data analytics that I have now as well. um so so got the experience for the better part of a decade to build up this quality control function which i think is sort of like a related cousin to internal audit you're still looking at controls and how do we prevent issues from happening or how do we detect and react to them on the back end if they do um so i had the great fortune of doing that and then 2021 i got called back from our cfo at the time came and said hey You know, we have an opening now. It's not only managing the internal audit function, but our enterprise risk management function as well.
00:26:10
Speaker
Do you want to step back into that role? And it was the perfect timing for me. i had left a really good team within the quality control side, had the succession plan in place to leave it in good hands. And so That's when I step back into my current role that I have today. But really getting back to your question around what then led me to sports betting, it was really part of like the ERM assessment of you're looking across the organization. You're trying to understand what's our key objectives that we have as an organization. Then what are those risks that may prevent us from achieving our objectives and our you know objectives is trying to fight provide a world class athletic and academic experience for our student athletes? That's our core mission. That's our core objectives. And you just saw this growing amount of pressure as it related to legalized sports betting at 2021. You know, really started back to 2018 when the Supreme Court overturned PASPA, which then opened the door for states to be able to legalize sports betting. And so.
00:27:16
Speaker
You know, back in 2021, we're at a point where, gosh, about 20 states had started to legalize sports betting and you started to just see a lot of negative risks and implication on that for our student athletes. You know, another core objective of ours is to try to promote fair play and integrity on our competition. And so you started to see a lot of risks as it related to the integrity of our competitions as well. start to manifest. And and so then 2023 comes around and our current president, Charlie Baker, who was the former governor of Massachusetts, came in. and And Massachusetts had just recently went through legalizing sports betting and and they really did it the right way, which you know we so see some states who have a very thoughtful approach to legalizing and unfortunately some other states that don't have as thoughtful of approach but charlie brought with him just a wealth of knowledge and he he called it from the get-go that like this is going to be a huge challenge for college athletics this is going to be a huge challenge for student athletes and so that that really gave a lot of juice to to to my role and and trying to work across the organization to
00:28:29
Speaker
better managed sports betting risks. But, you know, back to your question to like, I think enterprise risk management audit trains us to do these things.
00:28:40
Speaker
Risks take a lot of different shapes and a lot of different sizes, but just that skill set to be able to identify and isolate. Okay, here's the two or three biggest risks that I'm dealing with related to this topic.
00:28:55
Speaker
And then now, how do I think about, you're never going to eliminate risks, but how how do I think about reducing those risks to hopefully a, a, a level that's within your risk appetite and risk tolerance. So that, that was kind of the breakdown as I started looking at sports betting, here's the challenges and here's some of the opportunities for us to put in place programs and other work to, you know, mitigate those risks to hopefully an acceptable level.
00:29:20
Speaker
Okay, excellent. Now, not to get into the weeds, and I don't need a long-drawn answer on this, and I don't want you to throw a state under the bus, but you say some states might not do it the right way. whats What's an example of something that a state could enact related to betting that is, oh, you're like, how could they do this? This is not good.
00:29:38
Speaker
Yeah, so so we're in a position now where 39 states plus the District of Columbia have legalized sports betting. And there's you know six or seven things that we've identified as really good practices as it relates to you know college students generally, but certainly protecting college athletics. and And one is just the age of when you can participate in sports betting. so the large majority of states are 21 plus, and that's where we think is the right level. like so Sports betting is a form of gambling.
00:30:14
Speaker
Gambling, unfortunately, a lot of people could do it and set limits and have responsibility when it comes to gambling, but there is a certain segment of the population, unfortunately, that um you know that really struggles with it and could lead to a a disorder it's It's addictive, just like drugs or alcohol. It's triggering the same things of that you know that dopamine and that um sort of reaction in your brain to wanting to pursue more gambling. It's it's a really interesting addiction because it's... you know The person that's struggling with it, it's the only one that that they think their way out is to do more of that thing. You don't have an alcoholic that thinks you know my way out of alcoholism is by drinking more alcohol. But for somebody who's really struggling with gambling, that's what they think is their way out. I could just you know keep betting and betting and betting and ultimately climb myself out of whatever hole it is. So, so you know, thinking about a young person's brain and certainly not fully formed when you're in those formative years, we think 21 plus is the right place to be.
00:31:20
Speaker
There's also certain bets that are really, really dangerous. um And mostly those are the prop bets where You're not betting on the overall contest. You're just betting on a portion of the contest. Who's going to make or miss the first free throw or the first kick in a game or, you know, the first set on a volleyball game or or the first striker ball ball in a baseball game. You know, so some of those micro bets, those prop bets.
00:31:48
Speaker
are are really dangerous in a ah couple different ways. One, they significantly increase the um risk around the integrity of competition because, you know, if somebody does want to try to fix a match, you aren't looking at the overall competition at that point. You're really looking at, I just got to fix the first play or the first inning or whatever it may be.
00:32:08
Speaker
And so the integrity risks are much greater, but even a bigger piece than that is just sort of the the harassment that we see directed at student athletes and those well-being risks, because now you've put ah an individual's name around a betting market. And then if a better loses his bet and he's angry and he wants to take it out on somebody, it's not looking at the overall team. He's looking at that individual and you didn't get 10 rebounds or five points or whatever it is. And I want to take it out on you. So, so just the mental health pressures that it creates around student athletes. So, you know, being really thoughtful around the the bets that you have in place.
00:32:47
Speaker
um And then there's certain things that we see across the States that are doing it well, where where they you know are monitoring integrity of different betting competitions that are offered. They'll report that to us before they put a new market into the books. They're reaching out and saying, hey, do you think this is a good idea or not?
00:33:08
Speaker
um There's anti-harassment laws that we've introduced to states that we think are a really good idea where you know if if an individual who's betting is identified as reaching out and abusing a student athlete, that they're banned from betting within that particular state, and that's shared across state lines. So that's just a few of the things that we think those states that are doing it right have implemented.
00:33:33
Speaker
So, i' Clint, do me a favor. I bet my colleague that you were going to say the word risk over 50 times. Can you say it 18 more times? Am I being reported right now? No, but that's what happens, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. That would be a prop bet on our on our podcast here.
00:33:51
Speaker
All right. So whenever I think about this college betting, of course, the two big things that come to mind right now, we're going through this BCS college football playoffs, right? We just grew not long ago to 12 teams. And then on top of it, we have coming up in a few months, March Madness. Those must be, I would assume, the two biggest items that people bet on. And what do we think the dollar amounts that are actually going through the two of these, you know, ah different um playoffs? Yeah.
00:34:20
Speaker
Yeah, so believe it or not, um that those two events are two of the three most popular sporting events in our country that are bet on. And when you look at the entirety of March Madness, that's the number one sporting event that's bet on in our country. And there's different studies and numbers that you could see out there. The AGA, the American Gaming Association, typically does a study once a year, but they've estimated somewhere in the neighborhood of $3
Combating Harassment and Using AI in Sports
00:34:48
Speaker
billion dollars is bet on the march madness tournaments and that's just in the regulated marketplace that doesn't include your you know march madness pools that you do with co-workers and things of that nature um and then the super bowl is second and then the college football playoff is third and so for college football playoff you're probably closer you know in the the one to two billion dollar range but still just an astronomical amount that's bet on both of those events
00:35:19
Speaker
Yeah, um I still can't get my hands around the amount of dollars that goes through all of that. And of course, the more money there is, the more incentive there is for people to try to cheat in some way, shape or form. So that's where you bring in all your risk. And you're always trying to figure out, OK, what is our biggest risk? Just like you said. But I just want to add now one more piece to this you know ever growing puzzle. What about Now, the fact that we pay college players and we have NIL, how is that affecting this whole sports betting industry?
00:35:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's something that, you know, the research is still young on this. A lot of these provisions around student athletes being able to receive name, image and likeness are just a few years old now, um as well as there's opportunities for revenue sharing now that um schools can opt in as part of the injection associated with the house settlement to be able to provide revenue sharing to their student athletes. You know, what I always say is, It's a little bit of a blessing and potentially a curse, but we don't know. It's a blessing in terms of, you know, now that you have student athletes that are receiving, you know, whether it's n NIL payments or Pell payments or or revenue sharing or whatever it may be.
00:36:37
Speaker
like That actually reduces the risk of gambling-related issues because you don't want to lose those payments that you're having and you realize by being involved with some sort of sports betting issue, um that that can certainly compromise your eligibility and your you know your ability to be able to have those NIL earnings and other things that you have. So, you know, I think it's it's helpful from that vantage point, but, you know, certainly we worried about it it does put a fair amount of disposable income um into the pockets of folks who are generally 18 to 22. don't know about you, but when I was in college, certainly didn't always make the the wisest financial decisions.
00:37:23
Speaker
And so, you know, a lot of our educational work that we're focused on is trying to educate student athletes like gambling or sports betting, whatever it may be.
00:37:35
Speaker
You're not going to win doing it. Only about two to 3% of individuals who engage in sports betting um ultimately win in the long time in the long term. So, you know, to the extent it's not violating our our rules, like it,
00:37:51
Speaker
You know, you could do it in ah in a safe, fun manner, set limits, things of that nature, but just keep it very recreational because there's certainly the danger to get in deep really quick.
00:38:03
Speaker
I can only imagine. it It is between the betting and between the NIL and the rev share and all of that, it's it's a whole new world. And I know things are just developing now. But, you know, we think about people who try to cheat, right? And, you know, maybe if I'm getting, you know,
00:38:20
Speaker
$4 million dollars a year NIL, I'm not going to cheat because I have that money in my pocket. But then you think about, well, what about the athlete that doesn't have and n NIL or that needs money? um And and then I think about in 2025, there was the NBA, ah Chauncey Billups, Terry Rozier, and Damon Jones. And then in the Major League Baseball side on the Cleveland Guardians, we had Emmanuel Classe and Luis Ortiz. All professional athletes have a lot of money,
00:38:45
Speaker
but they cheated to try to get more money. So do we see any risk associated with college betting the way that we saw it with what happened in the and NBA and MLB? And are those some of the risks that you're always trying to evaluate?
00:39:00
Speaker
Yeah, those are absolutely the risks that we're trying to guard against. And, you know, we've been very transparent. There's a fair amount of cases that we have have dealt with and are still dealing with at the college level as well. So certainly these risks are manifesting across all sports and and nobody's really immune to them. um You know, I think for us.
00:39:23
Speaker
It's really almost a numbers game, if you will, of there's there's 23,000 competitions in college athletics where there's betting markets around those. And so by sure volume of those numbers, like you're going to see some situations play out, unfortunately, that do.
00:39:41
Speaker
um compromise the integrity of those games. But, you know, one of the benefits to regulated sports betting is we we monitor all those contests and we deploy AI across those contests to see is there suspicious betting patterns and anomalies that, you know, may suspect some sort of integrity concern happens. So we're able to flag those things really quickly and and ultimately be able to investigate those and and get to the bottom of what happened. and And back to the regulatory betting framework, one of the things that we see working really well is that there is a requirement for the sports betting operators and the gaming regulators in certain states to be able to work with us as these investigations come up so that we could get to the bottom of what happened and um and handle it really quickly. But and you know it's it's certainly a risk across college sports. so I will say, you know i have this this trophy sitting behind me
00:40:37
Speaker
I think when you get to the NCAA championship level, the the competitors there, whether it's the student athletes to coaches to whoever it is, like that's what they're playing for. They're playing for the love of competition, the love of their teammates and to ultimately have their one shining moment hold up that trophy at the end. So it's really not there where I worry as much about integrity issues or sports betting related risks.
00:41:04
Speaker
I think the the more risky situation that we're seeing is, you know, a regular season college game on a prop betting market for the first quarter or first half. You know, maybe it's a team or a particular athlete that's towards the end of their eligibility or they're sort of out of contention for the championship at this point.
00:41:24
Speaker
and And unfortunately, there's outside individuals that are betters that just prey on those type of situations. And so that's really the the high risk situation that we're dealing with now and trying to guard against.
00:41:37
Speaker
Yeah. And I really appreciate what you said. I mean, as far as teams go, right, the thing I love about college is, you know, most of these people are never going to be professional athletes. Right. And they do it for their love of their team and the love of the sport and the competition. And in accounting, we always talk about integrity. Right. We talk about ethics. And I believe like you, I believe 99.9% of the students and the teams in college are like that and believe that. And that's why I love watching college a lot of times more than I love watching professional sports because it's a love of the game. So I do appreciate what you and NCAA is doing with evaluating the risk and trying to put those controls in place. But now let me move away from the actual athletes themselves. And let's talk about the betters for a moment.
00:42:23
Speaker
And I think you've used this term before. You've spoken out about angry bettors and harassment of athletes, like athletes, they're out there trying their best. And sometimes they're successful. Sometimes they're not. But now when someone loses and maybe loses a lot of money, the anger permeates. So tell me about what is an angry better and what have you been experiencing in your role here related to that?
00:42:47
Speaker
it Yeah, it's one of the most shocking things that we identified as you started to see this proliferation of legalized sports betting in America. they You sort of expected there could be some integrity challenges that come across with this. you know There may be some situations of student athletes engaging in betting or coaches or administrators or whoever it may be that we may see.
00:43:12
Speaker
an increase in cases. But I don't think what any of us really anticipated was just and almost immediately when a state goes live with legalized sports betting, you start to hear a lot of concerns from student athletes, from coaches around All a sudden, I look at my social media after a game and whatever platform it is, i'm just getting this flood of individuals who are angry bettors saying, hey, you cost me a thousand bucks on this bet or 10,000 over here. and And some of it's you know fairly benign. And gosh, couldn't made one more point? It cost me 50 bucks on my bet. But
00:43:51
Speaker
Unfortunately, we're seeing a lot of situations now where there's very specific, very targeted threats. You know, I had $10,000 on this bet.
00:44:02
Speaker
You didn't do X. You cost me Y. Pay up or I'm going to do some really horrible situation to you or your family or whoever it may be. So it's just really and unfortunate situations that we're seeing. We've hired a service that we've deployed across our championships that really uses like artificial intelligence and deploys it ah on the different social media platforms.
00:44:28
Speaker
And the AI is trained to actually identify that potential abuse and threats directed at the the student athlete or the coach or the official or whoever it may be. And then that puts us in a position to be able to report that onto the social media platforms. They could have that content taken down and ultimately those users banned. In some situations where there's threat to life sort of situation or other threats like that, we could actually report that on to law enforcement. And we've seen really good engagement with law enforcement addressing those types of situations as they come up. But a really unfortunate downside of this whole craze that we have in America called sports betting now is just the amount of threats and abuse that's directed to athletes. And and I know in Talking with colleagues at the other professional leagues, like everybody's dealing with that. And you see a ton of media reports from athletes across college and across the professional level, just talking about how sports betting has made their day-to-day life miserable.
00:45:27
Speaker
Wow. I mean, I can't get, i can't get my mind around this 23,000 games that could be better in one year, 1100 colleges, universities. So how frequently do you actually need to, you know, you can't meet with all 1100 individually. So do you have to have like quarterly meetings, annual meetings? Like how do you communicate policies and issues that may be coming up with schools? Is there any specific cadence that you have?
00:45:56
Speaker
Yeah, so we're really fortunate in that our schools at sort of the the boots on the ground level, they're responsible for educating their student athletes as they come into the system and then reoccurring education that they do on a yearly basis with their student athletes. So they're kind of our frontline a defense, if you will, where they're providing education to all the athletes around what the rules are and some of the dangers associated with um betting. But one of the things that we flagged from a risk analysis standpoint is, yeah, there's a lot of education that happens around the rules. That's great. But there's all these other harms and risks and dangers associated with sports betting. How do we kind of come at it from a different angle when we do education for our student athletes? So we partnered with this company called Epic Global Solutions.
00:46:46
Speaker
And what Epic specializes in is they actually have what they call a lived experience
Education and Awareness Programs for Athletes
00:46:51
Speaker
format. So you have former professional athletes, former student athletes who have suffered some sort of gambling harm, whether they were involved in an integrity issue or you know some of them ended up millions and millions of dollars in debt from gambling. Some got incarcerated because of issues associated with sports betting and gambling. But fortunately, they've came out on the other side of that. And now they want to tell their story and hopefully prevent student athletes from going down a similar path.
00:47:21
Speaker
um as they did. So we've been partnering with EPIC since 2021. And through them, we've reached and in person on college campuses across America, over 100,000 student athletes that have been through the program. So we're really, really proud of that. But when you have 1100 institutions and half a million student athletes that, you know, recycle every every year, It just becomes ah a numbers challenge. We can't have Epic go out to every single campus, unfortunately, and reach every so student athlete. So a couple years ago, we we rolled out a digital learning platform as well that's on nca.org slash sports betting.
00:48:02
Speaker
um and And it tries to replicate some of that magic of the lived experience session, but talks about you know the importance of integrity and what our rules are related to sports betting, but some of those human elements too of problem gambling and the dangers associated with that to dealing with harassment and you know, different services to be able to handle mental health issues associated with that and, and just different tools that you could implement on the social media platforms to hopefully prevent that abuse from happening in the first place. So that's how we've really tackled education. A lot of our conferences do a lot of great work in that space. So it really is sort of like a,
00:48:45
Speaker
all hands on deck type of approach that we have to educating our student athletes in this space. Sure. I'd say it's a great resource to know that you provide and is available to students because again, you know, I always call myself, I am my own college kids. I say, well you know, we're in college, we're just dumb kids, right? We don't really know a lot about anything and it's all learning. And now all of a sudden you put all this gambling and these, you know, um these angry bettors involved. It's a lot for or someone of that age to have to deal with, right? You're learning just how to- how to try to get an education, how to help your team. So it's hard. So it's great to know that you have that.
00:49:22
Speaker
And thinking about the future, right? you know Our future is changing every day between AI, data analytics. Now you put on top of it, these micro bets and prop bets. and We're trying to you know, stay in compliance with, you know, what we believe the proper rules for safe betting are going to be. But I have to think there's going to be many new emerging risks that we don't even know what they are yet. So I know we don't know what we don't know yet, but do you have any risks on the horizon that you are fearful about or you're trying to put new controls in place to solve? So I'm just trying to figure out what what do you see coming down the road?
00:50:04
Speaker
Yeah, when it comes to sports betting, the biggest danger that I'm seeing right now is you know we we could agree to disagree with some of the betting operators and gaming regulators on what happens within legalized, regulated sports betting across the 39 states who have decided to legalize that. But overall, we see the system working ah in a lot of ways. like We can collaborate when it comes to identifying integrity issues. And there's great educational programs that happen at the state level.
00:50:38
Speaker
And a lot of good things are happening in that space. i think, unfortunately, like we kind of let the floodgates out and now we're trying to reel some of these things back in But overall, I think we'll find the waterline, get to a good place where we have the appropriate safeguards in place. But now what we're seeing is all of these what I call sort of gray market or quasi regulated things that look and feel exactly like sports betting. But there's a slight nuance to how they describe themselves that it ends up being regulated from and by another regulator or not regulated at all. So. One of the big things that we're dealing with right now is what's called prediction markets. And it's basically, it's like a stock that you could offer on well, this team, you know, here's this event contract. Will this team win or lose? Or will this player get 10 rebounds or not get 10 rebounds?
00:51:32
Speaker
And you put money in. And if that happens, you win. If that doesn't happen, you lose. So you look at it and if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's it's probably a duck, right? And so And it's really dangerous back to our conversation on, you know, you have student athletes now, some who may be getting an aisle endorsement, some who may be getting rev share. And we're trying to steer them towards, you know, safe financial investing that would be great for their future. and now all of a sudden on different stock trading platforms, you have these
00:52:09
Speaker
prediction markets that are basically just sports betting at the end of the day. So it's what I describe as kind of the the wolf in sheep's clothing, if you will. um But we also there's there's apps that you could download where you put in fake currency into the app and then all of sudden you could bet that fake currency on any sort of sporting contest across the college and professional levels. They kind of call themselves sweet sweepstake apps.
00:52:35
Speaker
um You have daily fantasy that exists in a lot of these states without legalized sports betting. And so that's really the danger to me is all of these different permutations that sports betting has taken. And at at least we have sort of a fight in a way to be able to handle it within the regulated marketplace. But now with all of these different permutations in the gray market, it's almost become unwieldy to try to manage. So I hope that that's something as a country we, you know, we at the NCAA can't do it, but I hope as a country we could put better safeguards around that activity.
Future of Regulated Sports Betting in College Sports
00:53:11
Speaker
And and then, you know, there's there's the good old fashioned unregulated marketplace that still exists, too. So um we're constantly encouraging law enforcement and others to try to get a better handle around that activity as well.
00:53:25
Speaker
ah Yeah, i it's just it's a monumentous task. Now, you you just used a word that I didn't use yet, and I want to just ask you about this one word. We've been talking about sports betting on the college level, but we also have fantasy, right? Now, we know fantasy football. NFL is huge. Fantasy baseball, fantasy basketball, hockey, whatever it is. Do you get a lot of this fantasy play at the college level, whether it's football or basketball? And is that something that you also have controls in place or have to evaluate that risk?
00:53:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's something that we definitely have to evaluate that risk. More traditional fantasy games are not as popular at the college level as they are professionally, where you know you build one roster, you draft players, and then you have that roster throughout the entire season. And I think the reason being is there's just so many teams and so many contests across college that for some reason it hasn't taken off as much as it has at the professional level.
00:54:25
Speaker
But what we do see that's really popular is daily fantasy where just day you know just for this one day, I'm going to construct a basketball team and I'm going to pick you know this person from this school as my center and this person as my point guard and this is my guards and my forwards. and play a competition within that um individual day. and And that is hugely popular in college, um certainly in some of the states like Texas and California, where you don't have legalized sports betting. It's something that's unfortunately marketed and advertised really heavily on college campus on campuses.
00:55:02
Speaker
so So we have developed relationships with that organization where If they do flag some sort of concerning behavior, they know who to report those issues to. and and those organizations have done some things to try to almost hold themselves out similar to how betting operators are, where you know they're limiting certain bet types. And you know generally, it's 19 plus on those platforms versus 21. So there's some limitations, but so certainly not to the level of what exists at the the regulated sports betting operators.
00:55:37
Speaker
So you did mention that you have this resource available, whether it's Epic who goes on campus or now you have an electronic and digital version on your website for these college athletes. But do you also train the coaches and the administrators and dare I say the parents of these athletes on all the risks that their college athlete, child or team player faces?
00:56:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great question. And unfortunately, with with coaches, we have seen a number of cases over the last several years. We had a case a couple years ago of a coach that was sharing insider information with the outsider best outside better on a baseball game. And there were some really serious consequences for that coach and just other situations where we see You know, coaches who don't have lucrative salaries necessarily betting three, four hundred, five hundred, eight hundred thousand dollars in bets over a certain amount of of time. So we've taken similar education as we do to student athletes. And a couple years ago, we rolled out a digital platform for our coaches as well. And that's something where every college in America, free of charge, could could basically assign their coaches to take that um learning. And we've had really good success with that as well. So we're certainly focused on educating our coaches and administrators as well.
00:57:03
Speaker
um When it comes to parents, it's ah a really good point because we've done a lot of research and studying parents. the The betting behaviors of not only college athletes, but but college kids in general. And unfortunately, over half of the individuals who are betting typically start at the high school level. So i think it really is important that parents are starting to have those conversations around betting.
00:57:31
Speaker
What betting is and how to be so how to be safe and, you know, hopefully avoiding it and in many situations at the high school level. So one of the things that we've done there is that digital learning content that we roll out for our student athletes.
00:57:47
Speaker
It's also a task that we have as part of our eligibility center process. um Again, we have ah over 200,000 prospective student athletes, so high school age individuals that go through our eligibility center, and all of them have this opportunity to do the sports betting education at that level. and Oftentimes, what we see is those prospective student athletes are engaging with their parents and other counselors and folks of that nature as they go through the learning. So hopefully there's there's some resources there for parents, but certainly it's an area when you look at it from a ah risk control standpoint where we need some better controls in place to provide education at the high school level to parents and guardians of the dangers associated with sports betting.
00:58:34
Speaker
Sure, I can appreciate that. So, I mean, this has been absolutely amazing, Clint, all of these insights. I really appreciate it. I have one last question for you. And I don't know if you can answer this, but I'm going to put it out there anyway. If you think about the future of the NCAA and sports betting and how they're all affected, you know, the controls you need to put in place,
00:58:56
Speaker
We have all this new technology coming out, analytics, AI, people trying to cheat, angry bettors. Are you optimistic about where we can go with this in the future? Or are you more on the pessimistic side saying, hey, this whole legalized betting is really pulling us down? Or do you feel that if done appropriately, hey, this could work out pretty well? What are your thoughts?
00:59:17
Speaker
Yeah, again, I think the biggest um challenge as a country with this, and and part of this was, I think, exacerbated by COVID and states were looking for additional revenue opportunities. And that's right around the time. Here's this new thing, sports betting, and we could generate a lot of tax revenue from that.
00:59:37
Speaker
And so, you know, we almost, instead of taking like a crawl, walk, run type of approach, I think we took ah a run approach and just threw everything at the wall, basically when it came to sports betting and we're in this process of seeing what's going to stick or not. So I am optimistic that when you look a decade down the road, we could get to a place, at least in the regulated sports betting industry, um where the appropriate checks and balances, the appropriate safeguards are in place to make it something that, you know, a lot of people enjoy recreationally and they could set limits and they could have fun with it. And it adds to the entertainment of a given contest. But
01:00:20
Speaker
they They keep it within reason. And we don't see these situations where, you know, people are getting millions of dollars in debt and athletes are getting harassed and it's jeopardizing the integrity of our competition. So I'm i'm optimistic that we can get there. But as our president says,
01:00:38
Speaker
You know, to use a baseball analogy, it's a nine inning game and we're still on like the bottom of the first tier. So it's going to be a it's going to be a long, long game. And we've got a long way to go. But I think we'll ultimately get there.
01:00:51
Speaker
Well, thank you, Clint. And I'll say this, you know, i didn't play sports in college. I played high school football. And if you were allowed to bet on high school football, if somebody would have just bet, I bet Mike drops every single pass they ever throw to him. They they could have been millionaires. They could have been millionaires. I didn't catch anything, but that's another story. Anyway, listen, Clint, I can't thank you enough for being here. Your insights were absolutely amazing. And I look forward to hopefully having a chance to speak with you down the road in the future and see where everything in this ah world and in your profession you know goes.
01:01:23
Speaker
Yeah, I hope to do it again. Thank you, Mike, so much for the time. And thanks to all your listeners. I really appreciate it. And I just want to say thanks to everyone out there. Like Clint just said, we really appreciate you tuning in, listening to the show. And I have to say, Clint Hunkabrow, NCAA, and all of his experience and expertise, it was just amazing what he shared with us. So again, thank you so much, Clint, for joining us here and being our guest today. We really appreciate it. And I just want to make sure everyone is aware you can earn CPE credits for listening to this podcast. All you need to do is visit the link in the show notes, click on it, and you can get your credit that way.
01:02:01
Speaker
Or if you're already a Prime CPE subscriber, you can get your CPE at no extra cost. All you need to do is just log in to finalize your credit. So that's everything we have for today. Thanks, everyone. We look forward to seeing you in another Becker Cool Careers in Accounting podcast in the future. Thank you again.