GREENSBORO, N.C. — Sports betting in North Carolina officially launched on March 11.
NCAA's President, Charlie Baker, announced a push to ban prop betting in certain states, including North Carolina. He said it's a way to protect athletes and wants state lawmakers to get behind it as well.
"Sports betting issues are on the rise across the country with prop bets continuing to threaten the integrity of competition and leading to student-athletes and professional athletes getting harassed," Baker explained.
Prop bets — short for proposition bets — allow gamblers to wager on statistics a player will accumulate during a game rather than the final score.
We spoke with one Greensboro man who feels the opposite. Kyle Webb said prop betting is a fun way for him and his friends to bet on games in cases where their teams may not even be playing.
"We always talk about you know, how many 3-pointers is Steph Curry going to hit tonight, things like that and that's fun to track, like I said, especially when you don't have a rooting interest in either of the teams that are playing," Webb said.
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NCAA's issue with props betting is that sometimes, people losing those bets will reach out and harass the athletes they were betting on. Something Webb thinks will still go on regardless of banning prop bets or not.
"There's always some folks that are gonna take it too far unfortunately, and I don't think that should inhibit the rest of the folks that are having fun and being responsible about it, to make them not be able to do it anymore," Webb said.
Baker also mentioned in his statement that this week, the NCAA will be contacting officials across the country in states where prop bets are allowed, such as Kansas and Louisiana, pushing for these bets to be removed.
State Representative Jason Saine, one of the lawmakers who pushed to legalize sports betting in the state, says that eliminating those bets is not something the legislature will consider during the upcoming session that starts in April.