It's easy to forget, six years on, that the case responsible for legal sports betting existing in most of the country at all started as a fight specifically about New Jersey. Murphy v. NCAA, decided by the Supreme Court in 2018, struck down the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act — a law that had kept legal sports wagering confined almost entirely to Nevada since 1992 — after New Jersey argued the federal government had no business dictating what the state could and couldn't regulate within its own borders. The Court agreed, 6-3, and within months New Jersey had a functioning legal sports betting market. Most other states followed at their own pace over the years since.
For a state that ended up at the center of that legal fight, New Jersey's sports betting market has grown into one of the largest and most competitive in the country, regularly ranking among the top states by handle. That's relevant background for anyone at Princeton, given how directly the case traces back to home turf — but the more interesting story six years out isn't really about New Jersey's market specifically. It's about what the broader legalization wave has meant for college athletics, an institution that's had a genuinely uneasy relationship with legal betting from the start.
The integrity concerns aren't hypothetical. In 2023, an NCAA investigation into suspicious betting activity connected to Iowa and Iowa State athletics resulted in charges against several student-athletes for wagering on games, including some involving their own teams — a violation regardless of the sport being bet on, given the NCAA's blanket prohibition on athlete betting. Alabama's baseball program was hit with its own scandal the same year after a coach was found to have shared insider information tied to a bet placed on a game the team was playing. More recently, prop betting — wagers on individual, granular outcomes like a specific player's stat line rather than the final score — has drawn particular scrutiny, since those markets are widely seen as easier to manipulate with insider access than a simple win-loss line.
The NCAA has responded by tightening its own rules, including working with states and sportsbooks to restrict or eliminate certain prop bet markets on college athletes altogether in some jurisdictions. That's a meaningfully different posture than professional sports leagues have generally taken, where prop betting on individual players has become one of the more heavily promoted product categories at most major sportsbooks. College athletics occupies an odd middle ground here — unpaid, or only recently and partially compensated, athletes whose individual performances are nonetheless available as betting props in a growing number of states, with the athletes themselves barred from participating in any of it.
For students trying to understand how different states have actually structured their markets in the years since Murphy v. NCAA, it's worth looking at how the landscape varies. Colorado's approach is often cited as one of the more mature, well-regulated examples nationally, and a look at how colorado sports betting websites operate under that state's framework offers a useful comparison point to New Jersey's own system, particularly around licensing structure and consumer protections — an area where states have taken meaningfully different approaches since 2018.
Six years after the ruling that started here, the sports betting landscape looks almost nothing like it did before Murphy v. NCAA, and college athletics has arguably felt that shift more acutely than almost any other corner of American sports. The legal question that New Jersey brought to the Supreme Court has been settled for years now. The harder questions about what legalized betting means for the integrity of amateur athletics are still being worked out in real time.
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