How Prediction Markets Can Save College Sports
Over time, the influence of organized crime in college sports has faded, or at least decentralized. Not because of a sudden moral awakening, but because of increased friction. Increased scrutiny from law enforcement using ever more powerful surveillance technology. Bets that were harder to place and easier to trace. Tighter restrictions on what, exactly, could be bet on in college sports.
That friction is now at risk of disappearing almost entirely—and it might be a good thing.
From Point-Shaving to Proximity
Traditional college sports betting focuses on point spreads, game scores, and futures. Depending on the state you’re in, you can even bet some individual player props, like how many points a specific player scores in a basketball game. These types of bets, even when they’re “fixed”, still come with elements of the unknown. Players who are shaving points for their team, for instance, still have to contend with the randomness of the rest of their teammates who aren’t in on the fix, along with their opponents. There’s still a margin for error when it comes to match fixing and point shaving.
Prediction markets, however, aren’t limited to the traditional bets you can make in college sports. The types of trades you can make are dramatically more granular, and you can theoretically trade on anything. Will a player play tonight? Will a player foul out? Will a player get “injured”? All much easier for an individual to influence than the final score or outcome of a game—and all bettable.
Individually-influenced bets introduce information asymmetry—those who know the future, or are creating the future, stand to gain everything. And where there is potential for information asymmetry, there will be those chomping at the bit to take advantage of it.
The college sports crime syndicates of the future aren’t fixing games, they’re maintaining a well-connected network of college athletes, agents and trainers—people with early knowledge of who will play, who won’t, and what decisions are about to be made. In prediction markets, the most valuable asset is proximity and the knowledge that comes with it.
Nowhere is that proximity potentially more consequential than one of the most maligned systems in college sports; the transfer portal.
The Easiest Bet in College Sports
In December, popular trading platform Kalshi informed federal regulators that it would be self-certifying markets on whether or not college athletes will enter the transfer portal. The filing lists NCAA Division I football and basketball as being eligible to be traded on. The specifics? “According to Kalshi’s filing, the markets…will be settled when a player publicly announces their intent to enter or officially enters the transfer portal. Statements on social media from players or announcements from agents or athletic departments constitute valid announcements, according to the filing.”
By design, the transfer portal concentrates information. Since the NCAA transfer portal launched in 2018, tens of thousands of athletes have entered. As of January 7 this year, 3,350 college football players were entered into the transfer portal for 2026, an astounding 25% of all FBS players.
Who is using the transfer portal matters as well; athletes from mid-major schools are less likely to receive NIL compensation than their counterparts from Power 4 programs, meaning they might be more likely to provide information as a means of compensation. Speaking as a former college athlete at a mid-major school in the pre-NIL era where athletes couldn’t receive any compensation—why would you not monetize your transfer, if legality is unclear and there isn’t a clear enforcement system? According to data compiled from Verbal Commits, Division I mid-major basketball programs lost an average of 7.4 players to the transfer portal in 2025. Power 5 schools lost just 6.8 athletes on average.
Average number of NCAA basketball players lost to the transfer portal in 2025
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. This is absolutely unacceptable and would place even greater pressure on student-athletes while threatening competition integrity and recruiting processes.
While portal trading may be too hot for Kalshi to touch right now, it’s important to note that betting on transfers would not alter a single possession of live play in college sports.
In fact, it might even help maintain the integrity of the game.
The Integrity Tradeoff
Fast-forward 10 years to a utopian scenario: Prop bets on college games are illegal across the board, and prediction markets have all but replaced sportsbook apps like DraftKings and FanDuel. The price Kalshi and Polymarket paid on their road to dual sports betting hegemony: they guaranteed regulators that they would monitor and stamp out any bets that could potentially impact in-game events.
Even today, prop bets on college sports are an endangered species. Only 6 states currently allow unfettered college prop betting, with the rest of the country a hodgepodge of restrictions. The only constant is a gradual tightening of rules, ratcheting up with every scandal that comes to light as politicians, conference executives and, repeatedly, NCAA president Charlie Baker call on legislators to enact a complete ban on college prop bets.
When I said earlier that increased friction has lessened and decentralized match-fixing over time, it’s true—but it hasn’t disappeared entirely. Just days ago, 20 men were charged in a point-shaving scheme that implicated 39 college basketball players on 17 different NCAA Division I teams. These cases are rarer than they once were, but history suggests rooting out corruption entirely is impossible. Not all forms of corruption, however, are equal.
Integrity in sports begins with honest, fair competition on the field and on the court. Point shaving doesn’t just alter game outcomes; the ramifications run much deeper than that. Once exposed, point-shaving and other bet-induced outcomes erode fan trust altogether. Every possession becomes suspect in the eyes of spectators. It’s the most corrosive form of corruption, because it degrades the value of the product on the field itself—and thus undermines the entire cultural and economic ecosystem of sport.
Prediction markets, and transfer portal trading in particular, introduce incentives that could move that corruption away from live competition and toward decisions that happen off the field. No points are shaved. No referees are paid off, no players are coerced to tank. The on-field competition remains intact.
And if no in-game outcomes are manipulated and no existing rules or contracts are explicitly broken, would transfer portal bets by insiders and players constitute corruption at all?
The objection is that some people will profit from privileged information—but of course that already happens everywhere. Journalists are paid for uncovering previously unknown information and scooping competitors. Sports organizations go to extreme lengths to unearth incredibly granular intel about recruits and draft prospects; the better the prospect, the better the team, and the better the team, the more money the organization makes. Knowledge is power, power is money, and—as long as no confidentiality contracts are being broken—bettors receiving non-public information on players’ off-the-field decisions are pursuing hard-earned opportunities common throughout sports and all other industries.
What prediction markets expose is how much of modern sports, and the rest of the world, run on information asymmetry. The real question here is, when it comes to betting on non-game action, how much, if any, “fairness” should be expected, required or regulated?
We are at an inflection point in the evolution of prediction markets as a sports world phenomenon: Massachusetts just won an injunction against Kalshi that could force the company to obtain a sports betting license in order to offer sports-related markets in the state. Other states will surely follow. But the ace up Kalshi’s sleeve? Proximity to the current administration. If they want to make it through this maze of litigation and regulatory scrutiny, Kalshi has the opportunity—and the best reason of all: self-preservation—to take the high ground and unilaterally proscribe in-game markets.
Prediction markets won’t entirely purify college sports. But if integrity means honest competition on the field and on the court, then allowing the few to profit greatly from inside information for the benefit of the many in enjoying the highest on-field integrity we’ve ever seen… may be a trade worth tolerating.