COMMENTARY

By Tim Dahlberg

updated 8:08 p.m. ET Dec. 7, 2005

The people who run college sports and the people who allow you to bet on them both have a lot to look forward to in the Rose Bowl.

The prospect of a true national championship game excites the big conferences and the NCAA. But it’s the Vegas sports books and Internet gambling sites that are really salivating about the matchup between No. 1 USC and No. 2 Texas.

It’s little wonder why.

More money will change hands on this game than any college game ever. So much money will be bet on the game that, when all the millions are totaled up, it could approach Super Bowl levels.

That’s all good for the casinos, which never have a problem taking money from gamblers. And it’s nice for the ardent fans of both USC and Texas, who might like a little more action riding on the game than just bragging rights.

But it probably will cause much consternation and handwringing inside the NCAA, which regards sports betting as such an evil that it has gone to Congress several times to try and get betting on college sports outlawed.

The NCAA’s stance might look laudable, but it is largely the byproduct of another era. It’s based on perceptions that sports betting corrupts young athletes and opens the possibility to funny things happening during games.

That made some sense in the ’40s and ’50s when information didn’t travel so quickly and college sports were true amateur events. But that’s no longer the case in today’s world, where everyone but the players are making money.

Think the idea of covering the point spread might influence players? How about having to win a game like Notre Dame did against Stanford to guarantee your school a $17 million payout in a BCS bowl?

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Now that’s pressure.

“The Notre Dame players didn’t have their heads low walking off the field because they didn’t cover the spread,” said Jay Kornegay, who runs the sports book at the Las Vegas Hilton. “They were just very relieved and very excited as they should be to be in a BCS game.”

They do care about it in Las Vegas, though, where the Trojans are about a touchdown favorite to beat Texas in a game that could generate $40 million in bets locally. And they care about it at the dozens of Internet sites that now make it easy for anyone to wager with the click of a mouse.

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The argument can be made that sports betting shouldn’t be so handy that it can be done in the comfort of a dorm room. But the bigger question is how sports betting hurts college sports.

The NCAA tried to answer that last year when it did a survey that showed 35 percent of male athletes bet on sports in the previous year.

OK, so it showed that members of golf teams bet the most. The real shocker, according to the NCAA, was that 1.1 percent of football players reported accepting money to play poorly.

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