TDuring this year’s men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments, athletes reported receiving death threats on social media. After LSU’s loss to Iowa last week, an emotional Angel Reese said she has received such threats since winning the national title in 2023. Days later, Iowa’s Gabbie Marshall said deleted her social media altogether due to threats thrown her way after she committed a game-clinching foul against UConn in the Final Four.
On the men’s side, Purdue’s Carson Barrett hit a 3-pointer at the end of his team’s win over Grambling State. That bucket appeared to have affected the betting results for people who had bet on Purdue’s margin of victory. Barrett’s reward? A direct message on Instagram that told him to “slit your throat” for “taking those three.” The sender ended the message by telling Carter, “I hope you kill yourself.”
Is this the new norm? Should college athletes expect this kind of abuse and threats from fans now? After Reese revealed the death threats she had received, many fans questioned the validity of her claims. But there are indications that it is much more common than people think.
“Recent data indicates that approximately one in three high-profile athletes receives abusive messages from someone with an interest in betting,” NCAA President Charlie Baker wrote in a March letter to campus leaders. “Data also shows that 90% of that harassment is generated online or through social media, while the remaining 10% occurs in person, and sometimes comes from other students on campus.”
I played for Syracuse University from 1996 to 2000 and it was a completely different world. Sure, fans were often unhappy after a tough loss, and my teammates shared stories of angry fans harassing them at the mall or at parties. And black players, from Reese to members of Michigan’s Fab Five in the early 1990s, have always endured a disproportionate share of abuse from mainstream America, which views them as too proud, too confident and too “haughty.” But the difference is that with the rise of social media, the abuse, hatred and threats have increased a thousandfold since our college days.
“We got so much response and it was really unexpected,” Juwan Howard, one of the Fab Five, told me for my book Athletes and Activism. “And then we didn’t have social media yet. What if we had social media back then? Man, it would have been crazy. It’s a good thing we didn’t have Twitter back then…all kinds of letters were delivered to the university and to Coach [Steve] Fisherman. Many of them had a very racist and hateful tone. Many with the N-word…it was like we were in the 1960s trying to integrate an all-white school.
Social media has given fans access to athletes; too much access. In the past, overzealous fans have had to write a letter and send it to a university to express their anger: the effort it took may even have given them time to calm down and question the wisdom of what they were doing . But now they can unleash their anger, frustration, disappointment, hatred, racism, sexism and other bile feelings directly on athletes with the simple tap of a button on their cell phone, in seconds.
Add sports gambling – which is now legal in most US states – to the mix and the abuse only gets worse as gamblers take out their frustration on players when they lose money.
“This harassing behavior appears to have increased as a result of legalization and normalization,” Amanda Blackford, director of operations and responsible gambling at the Ohio Casino Control Commission, told the Guardian this year.
It’s easy to forget that the targets of this abuse are often still teenagers and are not paid for their work – or for the threats they face. “What we are experiencing [in terms of threats and abuse]“It’s not one person, it’s the entire college athlete base,” Jordan Bohannon, then a senior at Iowa, said in 2022.
Not that professional athletes are immune. Deion Sanders, one of the greatest NFL players of all time and now head coach at the University of Colorado, revealed that he has received death threats and now travels with a security team. After defeat at the 2021 US Open, American tennis player Shelby Rogers said: “I’m going to get nine million death threats and stuff. At this point in my career I’d say I’m used to it.”
This cannot be accepted as a norm. The Communications Act 2003 would make it an offense to send a message that is “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or threatening character”. but it doesn’t seem like this is being enforced or adhered to. So now the question is: What are teams, colleges, universities and the NCAA doing to keep their student-athletes safe?
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Many are calling for harsher penalties for those found guilty of death threats, online abuse and harassment of athletes, including bans from attending NCAA-sanctioned events involving the school and/or athletes involved. But will that solve the problem of people watching from home and jumping on social media to spout their despicable abuse?
The NCAA is fully aware of the issue: It was a topic of discussion at the organization’s annual meeting, where Baker directly linked sports gambling to the rise in abuse. He has urged states where gambling is legal to ban betting on college athletes, in the hope that this will reduce abuse by angry gamblers. The NCAA also announced they are working with a data science company to identify threats.
“In principle [the data system] detects ugly, nasty things aimed at people… and can shut it down or essentially block it,” Baker said. “And in some cases even find out where it comes from.”
In addition, the NCAA is launching a new campaign to address some of the issues associated with sports betting, including abuse and death threats. The organization will no longer exist tell fans and students to “just say no” to gambling, but that they will “prioritize education and reducing the harm that gambling can do to a young person.”
It’s a good start, but is it enough?
The bottom line is that no college athlete, or any athlete for that matter, should be subjected to death threats. There is nothing they can do in court that would justify a threat to their lives. If sports betting is here to stay and the NCAA has determined that it is the cause of this increase in threats, then the NCAA and universities must do more to protect their “student-athletes” from this type of danger. Every threat must be taken seriously. Campaigns, educational techniques, conferences and slogans are cool, but death threats are not something that can be normalized.
The NCAA must send a strong message that threats of any kind to players will not be tolerated and violators will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and then follow up this statement with action. The NCAA, universities and college teams must ensure the safety and protection of their players. If they don’t, they are failing all student-athletes.