Over the last two days, the NCAA has announced investigations into 16 men’s college basketball players across eight schools for major gambling infractions, with three banned from college sports permanently and more cases likely headed for a similar resolution.

Though the NCAA isn’t releasing information on the pending investigations, they are all of the same variety: Players manipulating their own performance to win prop bets, information sharing with third parties and other activities that directly compromise the integrity of games.

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“We work hard to protect college games and the people who play them, the people who enjoy them and the people who watch them from corrupting influences,” said NCAA vice president of enforcement Jon Duncan on a conference call with the media.

But is the NCAA about to make its job protecting the game even harder?

In June, the NCAA Div. I Council introduced a proposal that would deregulate gambling on professional sports for athletes and staff members. The council is expected to take further action on the proposal at its meeting in October.

On one hand, it makes some sense. Given the serious threats posed by match fixing, the NCAA should be laser focused on those issues and not have to expend resources investigating whether your starting quarterback logged into his online gambling account to bet a parlay on the NFL or NBA.

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Here’s the fundamental issue, though: While it’s true that a college athlete betting on pro sports doesn’t impact the integrity of the game, are you opening the door to turn those 16 major integrity cases that we know about into 1600?

It is, shall we say, quite a risky bet?

Everyone understands how we’ve arrived at this place. The proliferation of access to sports gambling on a cell phone and the variety of prop bets available on individual players has made it tempting for college and pro athletes to engage in self-destructive behavior.

In one of the cases made public Wednesday, former Fresno State player Mykell Robinson was part of a scheme where his former roommate placed a series of under-line prop bets on Robinson’s performance in various statistical categories and then transferred him some of the profits.

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When you’re talking about bets that are relatively easy to manipulate for profit, it’s probably inevitable that some athletes among the many thousands playing Division I sports will think they can get away with it.

While the overall number of athletes known to be participating in these types of schemes is statistically small, it’s not insignificant to have this many cases simmering at once.

When the Division I council proposed deregulation on pro sports betting in June, it quoted NCAA chief medical officer Dr. Deena Casiero, who argued that such a change “may provide schools an additional opportunity to implement harm-reduction strategies, which can be more effective and have long-term benefits not seen with abstinence-only approaches.”

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What that tactic doesn’t address, though, is the very real threat that making gambling more available to athletes will lead more of them down a path of financial distress, leading to more bad decisions on their own games to stay out of debt. In other words, would it lead to college athletes betting on college games, particularly their own, to offset potential losses they could incur betting on pro sports?

Any sober analysis of a more liberal NCAA gambling policy must account for that possibility.

It’s the crux of the debate taking place around the Division I council. Do the current rules operate as a bulwark against more widespread problems, or are they hampering an overtaxed NCAA enforcement staff from focusing on the stuff that directly impacts the integrity of competition?

There are no easy answers, but gambling issues aren’t going away. If anything, the latest round of cases the NCAA acknowledged show that the problem has already taken root and there’s likely much more to come.

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If the NCAA ultimately deregulates pro sports betting, it will send the message that gambling is OK as long as it’s not gambling on college sports. That seems like a fine line to walk, with potentially disastrous results.