CLEMSON – It gets worse instead of better.

The world of college athletics forever changed when the NCAA allowed players to transfer willy-nilly without any ramifications. Players then got paid, first by way of NIL and later revenue sharing.

Do not get me wrong, sometimes change is good. College athletes getting paid, in a world where greed is everywhere, is a good thing.

However, the high dollar amounts in collegiate athletics are causing more bad than good these days, and it is changing things.

In case you have not been paying attention, gambling is more prevalent than ever before. Even Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney questioned things recently, which resulted in a large fine from the ACC.

With large amounts of money exchanging hands, the prediction markets recently decided they want to dip their hand in the cookie jar, too.

Predictions markets?

Prediction markets are online platforms where people trade contracts on the outcomes of future events, like elections, sports, or economic trends, with prices reflecting the collective forecast of their probability, acting like a crowdsourced way to predict the future using financial incentives.

Participants buy and sell shares in “yes/no” contracts and the market price indicates the perceived chance of that outcome, creating an incentive to research and reveal true beliefs for potential profit.

What does this have to do with college athletics?

According to ESPN, prediction market company Kalshi notified a federal regulator on Wednesday that it was self-certifying markets on whether college athletes will enter the transfer portal.

While the company says it has no immediate plans to begin offering trading on the portal, the decision still drew sharp criticism from the NCAA.

In Kalshi’s filing to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the markets will include NCAA Division I football and basketball players and will be settled when a player publicly announces their intent to enter or officially enters the transfer portal.

As you can imagine, this is not sitting too well with the NCAA. Recently, the NCAA sent a letter to Kalshi expressing its concern about the company’s “commitment to contest integrity and the protection of contest participants.”

In a copy of the letter ESPN obtained on Oct. 30, the NCAA’s chief legal officer, Scott Bearby, asked Kalshi how it monitors collegiate sports markets for integrity concerns and activity by prohibited customers, who it considers a prohibited customer, whether it will report integrity concerns to the NCAA and whether the company will cooperate with NCAA investigations.

On Wednesday, NCAA President Charlie Baker responded in a statement to ESPN.

“It is already bad enough that student-athletes face harassment and abuse for lost bets on game performance, and now Kalshi wants to offer bets on their transfer decisions and status,” the statement reads. “This is absolutely unacceptable and would place even greater pressure on student-athletes while threatening competition integrity and recruiting processes.

“Their decisions and future should not be gambled with, especially in an unregulated marketplace that does not follow any rules of legitimate sports betting operators.”

The is another example of how college athletics is being torn apart because of greed. Also, how in the world can the NCAA police any of this?

What could keep someone who knows a player or the player’s family from taking inside information they have heard and using it to their advantage? Yes, it is illegal, but when has that stopped people from trying to get away with things before?

Also, what if an athlete wants to get in on it and takes a cut?

What are we doing?

We are taking young men’s and women’s decisions, decisions that are supposed to be thought out and taken seriously, and we are going to predict what they could be doing.

Yep! That is going to end well.

All I can do is shake my head. The college athletics that we once loved, has died under the umbrella of power and greed.

It’s a shame.