For ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips, this is part of the necessary vigilance in the age of legalized sports betting.

“The proliferation of legalized gambling, that’s just the direction our country is heading,” Phillips said. “You can’t oppose it on personal grounds. You really have to, because this is an area that can do real damage when it comes to the integrity of competition. Let’s make sure we’re providing our student-athletes and our teams with the best resources we can from a conference perspective.”

Large betting fluctuations that could indicate game-fixing are easy to spot and explain, such as the Purdue-Virginia Tech game. More difficult to monitor are special bets, where players can bet on how many points a single player might score in a game, for example, said ACC Vice President Brad Hostetter.

Did a player miss a throw to keep his score low or because he thought it was the right way to play? Did a football player drop a pass on purpose or was it simply a sportsman’s mistake?

Hostetter said the ACC and its presidents would like to see the federal government regulate college sports betting, but the issue has taken a back seat as concerns about name, image and likeness have dominated the discussion about congressional influence.

“I felt like this was going to be a challenge for our schools and our student-athletes,” Hostetter said. “I thought it was going to be chaotic. Our members thought it was going to be chaotic.”

The NCAA, which has been working with a company called Sportradar to monitor the sports betting landscape since 2019, still prohibits bets by athletes and employees on any sport sponsored by the organization. In other words, betting on professional basketball is against the rules because the NCAA sponsors basketball at the college level.

It is a policy that schools are intensively educating their athletes about, and that is a challenge.

“There are a lot of things that are legal for these student-athletes that they can’t do,” Virginia coach Tony Elliott said. “It’s tough when everyone around them can do those things and then you have to tell them they can’t do it.”

In 2022, Virginia Tech linebacker Alan Tisdale had bet on professional basketball. When he realized he may have violated NCAA rules, he and Tech reported his case themselves. Instead of showing leniency, Tisdale was suspended for an entire season.

He and Tech appealed and eventually got his sentence reduced, first to nine games and later to six.

Later that year, the NCAA changed its penalty policy so that an offense like Tisdale’s would now be punished with a warning.

More changes could be on the way. The NCAA Council, which next meets in October, is considering lifting the ban on professional athletes altogether.

Gwinn believes the NCAA should make this change, but does not want to allow betting on college sports, where athletes and staff have access to inside information and could be targets of manipulation.

One thing he doesn’t want to change is Virginia’s law that uses geolocation to ban betting on schools in the state. A person in Virginia cannot place a bet on Virginia Tech, UVa, or any of the state’s other institutions.

According to Gwinn, this will help address one of the biggest concerns surrounding sports betting: that athletes could face harassment from bettors who want to influence their performance or are simply angry about the results.

“That reduces the threat significantly,” Gwinn said. “Our concerns would be a little less than they would be at a Tennessee or a WVU, where people in the college town are making bets on the team or even on the performance of a particular player. That can’t happen here.”

Not all states with ACC schools have the same laws, and the issue of harassment of athletes is Hostetter’s biggest concern.

“They go to class every day. They’re in dorms every day. In the lunchrooms every day. With people betting on them,” Hostetter said. “Then you add to that the growth of social media since sports betting was legalized in all these states and the ease with which you can criticize or harass someone on social media without it being faceless.”

360 helps in this area too. The company monitors social media for aggressive and concerning posts and can work with local law enforcement to investigate situations that arise.

Overall, Phillips is happy with the ACC’s position in overseeing the sports betting landscape, but says it’s important not to lose focus.

“Sometimes it’s not a question of if, but when, in situations like this, with so many student-athletes involved, so many sports going on, the outside influences,” Phillips said. “But I’m proud of how we handled it.”