ASU player accused of betting on basketball is a new era of headache for Bobby Hurley

The NCAA is alleging that more than a dozen former men’s basketball players at six schools violated rules against sports betting. Arizona State University is included in those universities.

The NCAA is not naming the student-athletes, but Chris Karpman is reporting who was involved with the Sun Devils.

Karpman is publisher of Sun Devil Source for 247Sports. He joined the Show.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Chris, what exactly is the NCAA alleging happened here?

CHRIS KARPMAN: With ASU specifically — this is not part of the NCAA’s release, but this is my own reporting that we’ve done for Sun Devil Source — former ASU guard BJ Freeman is going to be accused by the NCAA of making one or more prop bets on games in which he participated.

And it’s important to say that I don’t have reportable information about the specifics of the prop bets. They could have been on him or on other aspects of the team or on other players, and they could have been for ASU to do well. I just don’t have any ability to report on those things, other than to say that the NCAA is gonna accuse BJ Freeman of making one or more prop bets on games in which he participated last season for ASU.

BRODIE: OK. And as you report, and as I think any Sun Devil fan would know, BJ Freeman is no longer with ASU. He’s not a member of the team and left midseason last year. But while he was there, this was not some bench player. This was a pretty significant piece of their team.

KARPMAN: Yeah, he was their leading scorer at the time of his departure. He had arrived at ASU following the prior season from, where he was the Horizon League leading scorer, I believe, in fact.

And then he had some, several problems at ASU. There were some conduct detrimental to the team instances. He was ejected from a game against Arizona for headbutting Caleb Love, the star player for the Wildcats.

He also received a flagrant 2 ejection earlier for hitting a Colorado player in the groin area while fighting through a screen. I personally watched that one and in fairness to Freeman thought that it might have been unintentional. I don’t know.

But nevertheless, there were a few things that happened, ultimately culminating with him missing a road trip and then the ASU and Freeman parting ways. He announced later in the spring that he was going to transfer to (University of Central Florida), but then UCF never announced his addition.

But he went through a period of time that was quite chaotic from being a leading scorer and an extremely valuable, productive player to no longer being on ASU’s team and then now having this allegation made against him.

BRODIE: So the NCAA is saying that it’s not looking to penalize the schools that these players were at when these allegations were alleged to have taken place.

But I’m wondering what all this means for ASU, even if they’re not going to get necessarily punished, in this instance, there’s obviously not the first time there has been this kind of scandal associated with the men’s basketball program at ASU. What does this mean for the program?

KARPMAN: Well, this is another reputational hit for Bobby Hurley as head coach going into his 11th season. People may remember that the Sun Devils had a disappointing season last year.

So with Hurley now entering the final year of his contract — which is uncommon for college basketball coaches — after a very disappointing season in which everybody essentially transferred from the team except for Trevor Best.

And ASU will have, I believe, 14 new scholarship players this year, which is a record. The NCAA expanded scholarships from 13 to 15 for men’s basketball this year for the first time, and ASU is only gonna have one returning scholarship player and 14 new, which that wasn’t even possible before, given the limit of 13 scholarships.

And then we’re also in a new revenue sharing era where the schools are able to directly compensate athletes for the first time this year. And I don’t know that ASU basketball got as many resources as a lot of schools, given the nature of Hurley’s status as a somewhat of a lame duck head coach.

So, this is quite a tenuous period for ASU basketball, and I think the deck is stacked against Bobby Hurley moving forward, and this just kind of adds to that.

BRODIE: What does it say, do you think, that the schools, the coaches, like nobody involved with the current programs, the NCAA is not looking to punish any of them. They’re really just going after the student athletes involved here.

Does that maybe make it harder to get a handle on this?

KARPMAN: Well, perhaps, I, I think, without question, it’s a recognition that this is going to be commonplace and already is probably commonplace, given that we’re talking about a half dozen schools with players that have done this in the last year or the last recent history.

So, and that’s just the ones that are being alleged formerly to have done this. There’s probably other players who have given money to other people to bet on things, and maybe it hasn’t been caught in systems or whatnot.

So, I think that were the NCAA to try to continue to punish schools in the way that it did in a bygone era, we’d be talking about a never-ending series of schools getting caught up in these sort of enforcement actions. And I just don’t think that where we’re at in college sports today, that that would be a tenable situation.

So, this is like a lot of other things that have happened in college sports from NIL players monetizing their name, image and likeness, and revenue sharing, where schools are directly paying players. We’ve moved a lot more in the direction of players being treated in a lot of respects as professionals.

And so, just like if maybe an NBA player was betting a prop bet on himself or somebody else on the team, if the team had no knowledge of that, there probably wouldn’t be some huge punishment on the team. Maybe there could be a fine or something along those lines, but it wouldn’t be akin to what used to be the case in college sports. I think those days are basically gone.