Another week, another sports betting scandal.

It’s never been this easy for a player to fix the outcome of a bet. The onset of proposition or “prop” bets, in which gamblers can place wagers on specific outcomes in a game, has opened a Pandora’s box for athletic integrity. This month, the NCAA announced that a ring of college athletes had manipulated their performance in games to aid bettors and permanently revoked their eligibility. In October, the NBA faced its own seismic gambling indictments, more alleged prop rigging, complete with connections to the mafia. Now, the MLB is under scrutiny for a betting scandal of its own, with pitchers being accused of taking bribes in exchange for rigging pitches during a game.

Eight years after the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that had banned most states from legalizing sports betting, sports betting can feel like it’s embedded into every aspect of American sports culture. From bars to live broadcasts, online betting is changing how we consume sports. This is the age of the betting scandal — and the main suspect is that increasingly popular way to bet on games: prop bets.

Three takeaways on prop bets:

• Proposition or “prop” bets are wagers placed on the minutiae of an individual player’s performance: How many rebounds will a basketball center grab? How many touchdowns will a quarterback throw in the first quarter? Will a baseball pitcher’s first throw be a ball or strike?
• Because these bets are based on an individual player’s performance or even an individual play, they are more suspectible to cheating than bets on which team will win or lose an entire game. The recent sports betting scandals have largely centered on prop bets.
• Some leagues and jurisdictions are moving to ban prop bets outright or limit the amount of money that can be waged on them in a bid to curtail cheating.

“It’s one of the defining traits of this legal online sports betting era,” Danny Funt, sportswriter and author of the upcoming book Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling, told Today, Explained guest host Astead Herndon. “One player can very easily influence the outcome of one of these prop bets. It’s literally about the........

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