Starting August 1st, licensed Louisiana sports books will no longer offer prop bets involving a college athlete. A prop bet is when gamblers place a bet on how many touchdowns a quarterback will throw or how many points a basketball player will score.
“We want to protect the integrity of sports betting, but even more importantly than that we want to protect the integrity of student athletes and college athletics as a whole,” Gaming Control Board chairman Ronnie Johns said.
Johns says prop bets on teams as a whole will still be legal. Johns says this new policy will protect the integrity of sports betting as well as the safety of college athletes.
“Some of these bettors get very angry, they lash out at these athletes, they threaten them, and no studio athlete should be subjected to that just because they didn’t preform to the expectation of a bettor,” Johns said.
Vermont, Ohio and Maryland have also banned college prop bets. Johns expects more states will do so.
“This is a conversation that is going on all over the country, so I think we are going to see roll outs in the next few weeks of orders from a lot of states that have sports betting,” Johns said.
Sports betting became legal in Louisiana in 2020 and the first licensed sports books opened in 2021.
