Almost a week after the University of Iowa confirmed an investigation into online sports wagering that includes 26 current athletes, many unknowns linger.

“We’re dealing with a situation right now which, quite frankly, we still don’t have a lot of the details on,” Iowa head football coach Kirk Ferentz said before an I-Club event last Thursday.

UI Athletics administrators have not responded to questions submitted earlier in the week by The Gazette — including how the university is educating its student athletes on sports gambling and the stringent conference rules against it, and what involvement the 26 athletes can have with their teams — if any — during the investigative window.

UI Athletics Director Gary Barta did not appear last week for at the I-Club donor events in West Des Moines or Cedar Rapids.

Ferentz said the current gambling discussions reminded him of a time in the 1980s, when he was an assistant coach at Iowa, and FBI agents would speak to the team. At the time, sports betting in Iowa was illegal and conducted underground.

“I was amazed,” Ferentz said. “They threw out estimates of what they thought was going on in Iowa City in those times.”

The Iowa Legislature, following a U.S. Supreme Court decision, legalized sports betting in Iowa in 2019. By fiscal 2022, Iowans were wagering nearly $2.5 billion — the equivalent of over $6.5 million a day — on sports betting.

“I’d venture to say gambling is a big issue in our whole country right now,” Ferentz said. “It’s in our face. It’s accessible pretty much to everybody.”

Wes Ehrecke, president and chief executive officer of the Iowa Gaming Association, the umbrella group of state-licensed casinos, said there have been “guardrails” meant to prevent collegiate athletes from betting on sports.

“Those guardrails were appropriately established when this was legalized, and they are still in place,” Ehrecke said.

Ehrecke used the example of universities “educating their student athletes that you can’t be wagering on sports if you’re an athlete.”

Sportsbooks also take steps to verify a user’s identity for an online app — with by far most sports betting in Iowa now conducted online and not physically at a casino. FanDuel, for example, may ask users for the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, birth dates and mailing addresses.

Former Iowa men’s basketball player Jordan Bohannon has firsthand experience with some of those gambling apps’ safeguards.

“I can’t even get on DraftKings,” Bohannon said on a podcast last week. “They said I’m a professional athlete. I can’t use their website.”

Bohannon, who competed at Iowa from 2016 to 2022, expects every school “to have athletes that have infracted against the NCAA on sports wagering.”

Even though the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation is involved in the probe, no criminal charges have been filed. If conference rules violations did occur, the NCAA historically has not taken sports wagering infractions lightly.

When Virginia Tech football player Alan Tisdale self-reported that he’d made legal bets on the NBA Finals, he received a nine-game suspension. That would have sidelined Tisdale for three-fourths of his senior season. After an appeal, the penalty dropped from nine games to six. But he still missed half of the season.

The NCAA’s athlete reinstatement guidelines offer direction on where to start the “withholding analysis” in athletes’ punishments. The document breaks sports wagering violations into three categories:

The most severe category is when an athlete’s betting activity is “designed to influence the outcome of an intercollegiate contest.” These cases carry recommended sentences of permanent loss of eligibility. The Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission has indicated there is no evidence of this type of activity in this investigation.

The middle tier includes “any sports wagering activity through the internet, a bookmaker or a parlay card.” The NCAA guidelines recommend beginning the analysis with a “sit-a-season/charge-a-season” penalty — that means an athlete found in violation would miss a full season and lose that year of eligibility.

The guidelines also call for staff to “review cases on an individual basis to determine whether an alternative withholding condition is appropriate” for the second-tier violations.

“All other violations” fall into the third tier, where the recommended suspension depends on how much an athlete bets.

If the athlete spends less than $25, there is no suspension recommended. But more than $500 would line up with a “sit-a-season/charge-a-season” condition. In between are ranges for missing 10 percent, 30 percent and 50 percent of the season.

These penalties are solely where the Indianapolis-based college sports governing body recommends to “begin its withholding analysis” — so actual decisions may vary.

NCAA investigations are not always a speedy process, as Iowa’s most recent major NCAA infraction in 2019 showed.

An Iowa athlete reported to the UI an alleged violation — that then-volleyball head coach Bond Shymansky’s paid the summer rent for a student athlete — on May 1, 2019. The UI then hired outside counsel to investigate. By May 20, 2019, Barta placed Shymansky on 30-day administrative leave. At the end of the leave, Shymansky was fired on June 19, 2019.

There was little doubt about what happened. The day after Shymansky’s termination, he released a statement saying he paid an athlete’s “unanticipated summer expenses.”

But the NCAA’s verdict did not come down until May 20, 2020 — more than a year after Iowa began its internal investigation and exactly a year after Shymansky’s administrative leave began.

The UI volleyball program had to vacate all wins over the 2017 and 2018 seasons, pay a $5,000 fine and face recruiting penalties, the NCAA announced in its conclusion.

Last Monday, Iowa “received information” about 111 people as part of the sports wagering investigation, according to the university, in addition to the 26 student athletes.

“The vast majority of the individuals are student-staff, former student-athletes or those with no connection to UI Athletics,” the university said in a statement.

One full-time athletics department staff member is involved in the investigation, the UI said, although he or she is not a current or former coach.

For now, the waiting will continue for Ferentz and fans.

“We’ll just see what all comes out of this,” Ferentz said.

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