It’s been almost a year since Vance Walberg got the phone call every coach in college basketball, or any other sport, dreads.
Your players are placing bets on themselves.
“I was actually the one who turned the players in,” Fresno State’s 69-year-old coach said during Mountain West media day in October in, of all places, the sports gambling mecca of Las Vegas. “I got an anonymous phone call, saying there’s an issue on your team, and I could have let them go.
“I wanted everything out front. I didn’t want it to come back with someone saying, ‘Hey, you got a phone call from somebody, and you never did anything on it.’ That’s why I went to my athletic director and let him know, and his decision was let’s go take a look at it.”
His players were suspended, and in September, the NCAA permanently revoked the eligibility of Fresno State players Mykell Robinson and Jalen Weaver plus Steven Vasquez, a former Bulldogs teammate who had transferred to San Jose State.
A fourth player, guard Zaon Collins, was initially suspended for a game last February while the university reviewed “an eligibility matter,” but his name does not appear in the NCAA enforcement staff’s public findings. He returned to finish the season and is on Fresno State’s roster as the Bulldogs come to Viejas Arena on Saturday night to face first-place San Diego State (8 p.m., CBS Sports Network).
“In my wildest dreams, it’s something I wouldn’t ever think about, that you’ve got kids gambling on your team,” said Walberg, who has coached for more than 40 years at the high school, junior college, Division I and NBA level. “We had enough problems with (all) the injuries, then all of a sudden you kind of start putting a couple things together and think, ‘I could maybe see that.’
“It’s a live and learn. I pray to God it never happens again.”
Walberg essentially has an entirely new roster with a foreign flavor – three players from France and one each from Slovenia, Italy, Mexico and Senegal. Only Collins played regular minutes for the Bulldogs last season.
“You definitely don’t expect your teammates to do that,” said junior guard David Douglas Jr., who appeared in six games last season before injuring a knee. “But they made their choices, so you just have to move on from that and look ahead. We have a completely different group this year. … It’s a completely different vibe.”
The suspicious gambling patterns were ultimately flagged by what the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions describes as a sports integrity monitoring service. As part of its investigation, it was allowed to image the smartphones of Robinson and Weaver. In addition, Weaver agreed to cooperate with enforcement staff (Robinson and Vasquez did not) and admitted to impermissible gambling activities.
None has been charged by federal authorities with a crime, but any form of gambling is strictly prohibited by the NCAA.
Of the three, Robinson was the most active gambler according to the NCAA’s enforcement documents. They all were proposition or “prop” parlays, where you wager on whether individual statistics will be over or under a specific mark, then need multiple outcomes to all hit to land a bigger payout.
Robinson started with a $20 bet on a five-leg parlay that involved his performance in a Dec. 11 game at BYU, plus three college basketball players at different schools, plus a pro hockey player. The five projected outcomes didn’t all happen, and he lost the bet.
He also didn’t win parlay bets involving his performance in several other Fresno State games in late December and early January.
That changed Jan. 7 at Colorado State. According to NCAA enforcement documents, Robinson contacted his mother to wire $200 via Apple Pay to Vasquez, his roommate the previous season at Fresno State, so Vasquez could place a prop bet on his behalf.
The parlay: the unders on Robinson’s lines for points, rebounds, assists and 3-pointers. He finished with three (seven under his average), two, zero and one in a 91-64 loss. The winning ticket was worth $1,450.
Vasquez, the NCAA claims, then wired Robinson’s mother $1,425 plus $200 as a bonus from Vasquez’s own winnings, which totaled more than $14,000.
The NCAA said Weaver coordinated with Robinson before a Dec. 31 game at New Mexico, then placed a $50 prop bet on himself, Robinson and an unidentified third player that paid $260.
None of the alleged bets involved either of SDSU’s two wins against the Bulldogs last season, 82-64 in Fresno on Dec. 4 and 83-60 at Viejas Arena on Feb. 18. Robinson had left school before the second game, but Weaver had a team-high 16 points in 35 minutes.
It would be his final college game. Two days later, he confessed to investigators and was suspended.
The players are to blame, certainly. But both Walberg and SDSU coach Brian Dutcher fingered the prop bets offered by daily sports fantasy sites that have exploded in popularity in recent years.
Walberg: “When you have prop bets, who’s going to be on a prop bet except for someone who knows that guy, family, or whatever? To me, the NCAA should outlaw that. Not even a question.”
Dutcher: “Prop bets aren’t a good thing in any sport. It used to be, let’s try to mess with the (point) spread and you’d have to have maybe more than one guy involved. Now, one guy can affect one bet in one game. Prop bets are not a good thing in athletics.”
Walberg has remained in contact with Weaver, who is currently averaging 15.5 points for Zrinjski Mostar of the Bosnian pro league.
“Jalen’s a really good kid,” Walberg said. “He made a mistake. I think the hardest thing with Jalen was more with his mom, talking with his parents. They were really devastated. And it was tough. It hurt me. I’m not going to lie to you. It hurt me big-time, inside.
“But we all make mistakes in life.”
