David Purdum, ESPN
Damion Baugh boarded the TCU team bus after the Horned Frogs’ second-round loss to Gonzaga like the rest of his teammates, quiet and dejected. Their season had just ended in an 84-81 defeat, a disappointing close loss to a top-10 team for the second NCAA tournament in a row.
Baugh’s mood was briefly boosted when a team manager showed him a video of fans in a sportsbook celebrating Baugh’s 3-pointer at the buzzer. His shot cut Gonzaga’s margin of victory from six to three — irrelevant to the outcome of the game but crucial to an increasing number of people across the United States.
Gonzaga was favored to beat TCU by around four points, so Baugh’s shot flipped the point spread result. People who bet on the Bulldogs went from winners to losers in 0.7 seconds. Baugh’s Instagram was flooded with direct messages from angry bettors. He’s not alone.
In the five years since legalized sports betting began spreading across the country, student-athletes have reported regularly receiving abusive messages from gamblers on social media, including death wishes and threats of violence. An FBI agent told ESPN that it considers threats to athletes on social media to be a “growing issue,” and in March a group of college sports officials, state gambling regulators and sportsbook executives met to discuss how to deal with the problem.
“Colleges are stressed about it and have loads of instances of athletes being abused,” said Mark Potter, head of delivery for Epic Risk Management, an international advocacy group dedicated to fighting problem gambling. “One college had over 200 [instances].”
Baugh had never experienced the gambling angle of social media abuse until his shot against Gonzaga. He clapped back on Twitter.
I Don’t Get How Y’all Mad Because I Played Until The Last Buzzer🤦🏾♂️Proud Of My Team And We Taught To Fight Until The End……Nobody Told Y’all To Bet🤷🏾♂️
— DAM10N BAUGH (@_swaggyd10_) March 20, 2023
“Everybody playing sports growing up, we play until the whistle, play until the end of the game,” he said. “People just forgot about that. Saying I shouldn’t have taken the shot is saying, ‘We don’t care about the game. We just wanted to win our money.’
“I feel like tweeting at college athletes, period, is insane,” he added. “I think it’s because people think, ‘I can say whatever to him because I know he can’t say anything back.’ It’s getting out of hand.”
Rest is here…
