Colorado Buffaloes football star Travis Hunter is the betting favorite to win the Heisman Trophy on Saturday. But in Colorado, gamblers can’t take that action.
Colorado is one of about a dozen states that prohibit proposition bets on college sports, and that includes the potential Heisman Trophy winner. Prop bets are wagers on events that happen within a game irrespective of the game’s outcome, often focusing on the performance of individual athletes, like whether they score a touchdown or how many receiving yards they accumulate in a game.
The NCAA has urged states to curtail prop bets on college sports, arguing that college players, as opposed to professional athletes, could be more easily influenced to alter their performance to win bets.
Charlie Baker, the president of the NCAA, told CBS last year he was worried about scenarios like someone telling a student athlete: “What I'd really appreciate is if you could just miss your first couple of free throws this week — it won't affect the outcome of the game, but it would really help me…"
Colorado, though, was ahead of the curve, and banned all prop bets on college games in the state law that legalized sports betting back in 2019. All bets on high school sports are also prohibited.
A survey conducted by the NCAA found that sports betting is pervasive on college campuses, with 67 percent of respondents saying they bet on sports. And 41 percent of student bettors placed a wager on their own university’s teams.
There’s no college football player this year quite like Travis Hunter. The offensive and defensive standout transferred to CU Boulder in 2023 when Deion Sanders was hired as head coach of the Buffaloes. Sanders coached Hunter at Jackson State University in Mississippi prior to moving to Boulder. Hunter, born in Florida before moving to an Atlanta suburb, plays both wide receiver and cornerback. This season he played 672 snaps on offense and 688 on defense. The junior won the AP College Football Player of the Year award on Thursday.
While you can’t wager on the Heisman winner in Colorado, had you found a place like Las Vegas to bet back in August, you’d stand to take home a nice pot of money should Hunter win. He started out as an underdog, with odds of +3500, meaning a $100 bet would payout $3,600. Today, the odds are -2500, and so a $100 bet would only pay out $104 if he won the trophy.
The Heisman Trophy presentation is Sat. Dec. 14 on ESPN at 6pm mountain time.
