Fresno State men's basketball was a team going nowhere, smack-dab in the middle of a dreadful 6-26 season in 2024-25. They were set to host New Mexico on New Year's Eve as heavy underdogs, up to 17.5 points.
The hopeless nature of a forgettable game might have factored into Bulldogs guard Jalen Weaver's apparent belief that no one would notice when he placed a $50 daily fantasy bet on himself.
He thought he'd score more than 11 points that night, and he did, notching 13 in the 103-89 loss to the Lobos.
Yet from the obscure and seemingly unremarkable stat line in an otherwise obscure and unremarkable game- - this ain't the Final Four -- the NCAA was able to nail Weaver for his actions.
The $260 Weaver won that night wound up costing him his collegiate eligibility, the NCAA said Wednesday, while also announcing the banishment of two other players who competed at Fresno and San Jose State last season.
"I just made a bad decision, and I shouldn't even have gotten involved with that," Weaver previously told ESPN's David Purdum.
Let Weaver -- not to mention the 13 additional players at six additional schools the NCAA announced investigations into on Thursday -- be a lesson to everyone involved or tempted to be involved in manipulating so-called individual prop bets.
To quote Nike (sort of): Just don't do it.
Certainly not the players; no matter how easy it might seem to just punch a bet into your phone or tell a friend to take the under on, say, first-half rebounding totals so the two of you can share in some winnings. If you get caught, and you very well might, the NCAA is the least of your worries.
And certainly not the sports gamblers who are inclined to bet on such oddball things, especially involving low- and mid-major games. Unless you are in on the scam, you very well might be getting scammed. These kinds of bets are just too easy to manipulate. Why would anyone risk it?
"I bet on a game I played in, but I never tried to sabotage the season," Weaver said to ESPN last February. "I never bet on us to lose; never bet my unders."
It's not hard to see the temptation. Sports wagering and the requisite "fixing" that goes along with it have been present for generations, but sports betting has never been more in the face of athletes and would-be gamblers.
Advertisements. Partnerships. Betting apps.
It's everywhere, and thus tempting to everyone.
Easy money, just for scoring two more points than the line in some fantasy game? All while playing for a losing team?
Yet it possibly, or even probably, isn't going to work out. That's the lesson of all these NCAA cases that continue to pop up. Many don't involve the games and players that the public are focused on, but rather ones in the most distant corners of the sport.
A day after announcing the cases at Fresno and San Jose, the NCAA revealed 13 more athletes are suspected of "betting on and against their own teams, sharing information with third parties for purposes of sports betting, knowingly manipulating scoring or game outcomes and/or refusing to participate in the enforcement staff's investigation."
They formerly competed for six schools: Eastern Michigan, Temple, Arizona State, New Orleans, North Carolina A&T and Mississippi Valley. This isn't exactly Duke, Kansas and UConn.
The NCAA's history of enforcing its own voluminous rulebook is sketchy at best, but this is an entirely different deal. It has partnered with cutting-edge integrity watchdog groups that can analyze data and betting trends wholesale. The NCAA is also only one of several entities focused on this problem, from casinos and state regulators to the FBI.
It's impossible to know how many athletes aren't getting caught in the dragnet, but many clearly are.
"The NCAA monitors over 22,000 contests every year and will continue to aggressively pursue competition integrity risks such as these," NCAA president Charlie Baker said.
The NCAA is diligent in its education efforts, trying to reach all 500,000 student-athletes -- repeatedly -- with a message about the dangers, including that this isn't just about big-time players on big-time teams. It's everyone, even down to Division III.
"In terms of educating athletes, we [constantly repeat that] you don't have to be the star player in order to be at risk," Mark Hicks, who spearheads the NCAA's anti-gambling and anti-gambling education efforts, told ESPN. "That is something that is a key message point in every delivery session on campus."
If information sessions and workshops and posters in the locker room haven't been enough to reach everyone, then maybe more of these high-profile cases at low-profile schools in low-profile games will.
Because while technology has made this stuff so easy and tempting, it also has made getting caught easier, if not inevitable.