It’s been a tough week for the sports and gaming community. Kayshon Boutte was arrested on Thursday, with investigators alleging he placed 8,900 bets on games while in college. And a leading high-stakes fantasy football company has fired an employee who was caught cheating, using his status to change lineups while games were in progress.
Boutte, if the charges are accurate, not only bet on football while at Louisiana State but placed wagers on games involving his own team. He serves as a reminder that while the NFL and the NCAA can prohibit players from gambling on football, that’s simply not going to happen.
Boutte (pictured) likely will be suspended by the league. Previously, Calvin Ridley was suspended for the entire 2022 season, while Jameson Williams was suspended for the first four games of the 2023 season.
The cheating scandal involving the National Fantasy Football Championship is more troubling for fantasy purposes. It damages the credibility the game.
That company (which has been around for over 20 years) ran a postseason contest involving 1,521 players competing for a $150,000 grand prize. Some users noticed (and were able to document) a team making multiple lineup changes while a game was in progress, inserting Travis Kelce 3 minutes after he scored his first touchdown on Sunday. The previous week, the same team was able to insert Aaron Jones into its lineup after he got off to a hot start in his game at Dallas.
"Recently, with help from reporting by a public source, we successfully revealed a post-deadline move in one of our NFFC Post-Season Hold 'Em contests that was detected and quickly confirmed, resulting in SportsHub being able to take immediate action to resolve the issue without any impact to the results of the contest," wrote NFFC founder Greg Ambrosius on the company’s message board. "As a result of its internal investigation, an employee was terminated and a contest participant has been banned from further play on our platforms."
One can fairly worry that if cheating occurred in this game, has it also occurred in some of the many other contests run by this company? The same contestant placed 3rd in the same postseason contest in 2019.
Ambrosius says he’s confident no other cheating has occurred, and they’ve got an independent third party coming in to confirm as much. He says they’ve looked at the transaction timestamps for all moves made by this contestant in 2019, as well as during the 2023 season. “This owner was in 124 NFFC season-long contests in 2023 (lots of best balls) and cashed in 7 of them,” Ambrosius wrote. “That's right. SEVEN. There were no shenanigans that helped him win prize money.”
"Nothing is more important than the integrity of a pay-to-play contest," Ambrosius told ESPN in a phone interview Thursday . "We have built up 20-plus years of integrity through transparency and everything we've done. And by one action, it's put all of it in question. It's put me and everybody associated with our company in question.
"We're doing everything we can to make sure that we know everything about what happened, let people know, and to make sure it never happens again."
While that’s the hope and goal, it doesn’t seem particularly likely. Back in 2015 recall, there was an insider trading controversy, with a DraftKings using confidential betting info to win money on FanDuel.
—Ian Allan