Rigging A College Basketball Game Seems Stressful

On Thursday, federal prosecutors in Philadelphia brought charges against 26 people they say were involved in a scheme to fix bets on college basketball and Chinese Basketball Association games. The point-shaving scheme, according to a 70-page indictment unsealed that morning, involved at least three dozen players on 17 different teams.

Twenty of the defendants played college basketball during at least one of the 2023-24 and 2024-25 NCAA seasons. Some were already the subjects of NCAA investigations into betting violations this fall and were no longer competing. A few defendants, however, were active college basketball players until Thursday. Carlos Hart, Camian Shell and Oumar Koureissi, who are charged with fixing games at previous schools before transferring to new ones, have played in games as recently as this week. Simeon Cottle, a Kennesaw State player who's now suspended indefinitely, put up 21 points in a win the night before he was indicted. He is his conference’s leading scorer and was named CUSA preseason player of the year.

The indictment refers to the scheme’s ringleaders as “the fixers,” a group of people who started by recruiting and bribing players to fix CBA games during the 2022-23 season. After some success doing that, the fixers decided to try men's college basketball, enlisting NCAA players who agreed to make sure their team didn’t cover point spreads. Among the fixers, according to the indictment, were Marves Fairley and Shane Hennen. Fairley and Hennen were also indicted by a New York grand jury in October for alleged involvement in a similar scheme in the NBA—the one involving Terry Rozier. Where the bets in the Rozier case were player props—bets a single player could conceivably fix alone—the wagers mentioned in the Philadelphia indictment were spread bets and half bets concerning team scoring, which makes fixing a bit tougher. In colorful and depressing detail, the indictment shows just how exhausting it is to rig a team sport.