Ready to start betting on UK sports? Mitch Barnhart says 'new era' should be entered cautiously.
Mitch Barnhart knows it’s being billed as potentially “the next great landscape of revenue” for states looking for ways to balance budgets.
But to Kentucky’s athletics director, “it’s the next landscape of concern.”
The “it” Barnhart is discussing is a U.S. Supreme Court ruling so new — with results that could reach so wide — that he has yet to wrap his head around it.
Just a week ago the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 federal law, the Professional and Amateur Sports Gambling Protection Act, which banned commercial sports betting in most states.
When the original law was passed, its intention was to safeguard the integrity of sports.
Now that gambling likely will be permitted in many states — including several in the Southeastern Conference and potentially even Kentucky — maintaining the integrity of sports falls to the institutions and people that govern them.
“It’s a new era, a new conversation,” Barnhart said in a wide-ranging interview with the Herald-Leader on Monday. “Clearly that is something we’re going to have to monitor pretty closely.”
How that monitoring will be done and how much it will cost remain to be seen. It’s probably going to be a topic of conversation next week at the Southeastern Conference Spring Meetings in Destin, Fla., and for many, many weeks to come in college athletics.
“A lot of this is still at 30,000 feet, but it’s an interesting conversation,” Barnhart said.
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said something similar in a statement after the Supreme Court ruling came out May 14, granting states the right to allow betting on sports.
“We are in the process of reviewing the Supreme Court’s decision and its potential long-term impact on the SEC and collegiate sports in general,” Sankey said. “One of our first priorities is to ensure that we have thorough and effective systems in place to educate our student-athletes, coaches and other personnel on all issues associated with sports wagering.”
That looking at the systems in place part already is happening at UK, Barnhart said.
“We all have to be very thoughtful about what we’re doing and make sure we understand the ramifications of what that means for college athletics and how we ensure the integrity of our games — all of them — and what we do,” the UK athletics director said.
“The beauty of the college game is we’ve been free in that area with the exception of some things that go on in Nevada.
“We haven’t had that go on in our backyard so to speak. We’ve got to be really thoughtful about that going forward, see what the lay of the land is and I think we move very, very cautiously.”
Barnhart said he’d do what was necessary to “ensure the integrity of what we do,” including adding support staff as well as improving communication and education.
Kentucky has the benefit of already having a person on staff who dealt with the myriad issues surrounding gambling and agents while working at the NCAA in Rachel Baker.
“She spent a good chunk of her career up there,” Barnhart said of Baker, UK’s executive associate athletics director for compliance and ticket operations.
“So I have great expertise here in our department, and I’m comfortable that I’ve got someone who has knowledge. We’ll work closely with our conference office and absolutely with Rachel and with the NCAA to see where we go.”
This story was originally published May 23, 2018 at 1:17 PM with the headline "Ready to start betting on UK sports? Mitch Barnhart says 'new era' should be entered cautiously.."