“We’re on the same page as the NCAA,” said Robert Walker, sports book director at MGM Mirage. “The integrity of the game is paramount. Who’s going to bet if they think there’s anything wrong with it?” Rachel Newman-Baker of the NCAA told the media outlet: “I think we wouldn’t be reaching out to them if we didn’t think they had something that they could bring to the table. I do believe that they come across information that we might not hear. That’s something that we should be open to in terms of us sitting down with them and discussing it.”
According to Scripps Howard, a 2003 poll of 2,132 Division I-A football players revealed that 102 (4.8 percent) “either took money to directly affect the outcome of a game, were aware that a teammate had done the same, were threatened or harmed due to sports wagering or had been contacted by an outside source to provide inside information about a game.”
While the amount of this gambling in casinos is unknown, more than $2 billion in legal sports bets are made in Nevada annually. Scripps Howard also reported that online sports betting generated $4.29 billion in revenue in 2005. An anonymous former athlete at Northwestern University, involved in a significant gambling scandal at the school in the early 1990s, told the service: “I would hypothesize that today’s athlete is in quite a more dangerous situation with the Internet. I would assume that since betting is more easily accessible, the temptation would be that much greater.”