The wild saga and lasting legacy of the Tulane point-shaving scandal

With gambling on college sports back in the news, let's take a look back at one of the more interesting intersections between sports betting and college athletics.

Over the past week, the precarious intersection of college athletics and legalized sports gambling has been as busy as ever.

Last Thursday, Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon was fired following an investigation into suspicious betting activity on the Crimson Tide’s game against LSU six days earlier. While Alabama cited, among other things, “violating the standards, duties, and responsibilities expected of University employees” as the reason for the action, ESPN reported that sportsbook video surveillance showed that the person who placed the bets in question had been in communication with Bohannon.

Four days later, Iowa announced that 26 of its athletes from five different teams and one athletic department employee are suspected of betting on sports, in violation of NCAA rules, while rival Iowa State acknowledged that 15 of its athletes across three different teams are suspected of similar transgressions.

These episodes are the first of their kind in a world in which gambling – once taboo in American culture, particularly in the bastion of purity that is NCAA-sanctioned competition – is now mainstream. In college sports, though, they’re not exactly new. Nobody should be shocked gambling is going on in here.

In 1945, five Brooklyn College men’s basketball players accepted $1,000 to lose a game against Akron. Only a few years later, 33 men’s basketball players across seven schools were discovered to have point-shaved in 86 games from 1947-50. A handful of Boston College men’s basketball players were recruited by the mob to shave points in nine games during the 1978-79 season, a plot that was only uncovered after Henry Hill – who was portrayed by Ray Liotta in Goodfellas – told authorities about it in exchange for immunity in a drug trafficking case. Over the past 40 years, gambling scandals of varying scale have ensnared Arizona State men’s basketball, Northwestern athletics, Maryland football and basketball, Toledo football and men’s basketball, University of San Diego men’s basketball and Auburn men’s basketball.

A few of those cases are more high profile – the point-shaving scandal in New York in the 1940s and 1950s is maybe the most famous in American sports history while the Boston College and Arizona State ordeals have been made into documentaries – but perhaps none of them are quite as interesting as what unfolded at Tulane in the mid-1980s.