Auburn quarterback Payton Thorne said bettors found his Venmo and have requested money from him after poor performances.
On a podcast released Tuesday, Thorne said he's received requests from losing bettors who found his account on the peer-to-peer payment platform. Thorne most recently threw four interceptions in a 21-14 loss to Cal. Auburn had been roughly a -500 favorite to win the game.
"It's funny. When they lose money, they want their money back," Thorne said on a podcast called The Next Round. "But when they win money on a parlay, no one's ever sent me any of the money."
Athletes have long received vitriol — often for trivial mistakes or remarks — even during the letter-writing era. Naturally, accessibility through social media and increased personal stakes — via fantasy sports and betting — has heightened concerns that offenders should face more punitive action or that some other systemic change needs to take place.
Whether this is an issue exacerbated by the accessibility of sports betting — or an underlying problem of social media platforms — is a phenomenon prominent sociologists have yet to definitively explore.
While academics have tackled toxicity on social media as a general topic, they usually tether their experiments to politics, where widespread polarization and vitriol have more stakes on the populace.
Now, as online sports betting continues to proliferate and create legitimate stakes for ordinary people, more academic data will likely develop and create a consensus on its impact across a spectrum of sociological outcomes.
For what it's worth, wagering on college football player props is legal in only a handful of states. Of the states with online legal sports betting — namely, those with the most popular operators in FanDuel or DraftKings — only Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Kansas, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Washington, D.C., West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming permit wagers on college prop bets.
That means in all other states, wagers on players to go over or under on their passing yards total, for instance, are not allowed.
And in many of the aforementioned states, wagers on in-state colleges or games that take place in-state are not permitted.
Of course, anyone with access to a sportsbook was indeed able to wager on Auburn vs. Cal on the total or moneyline, wagers that would have been impacted by Thorne's poor performance.
Thorne is in his sixth season of eligibility after having spent his first four years at Michigan State. The 23-year-old quarterback started 12-of-13 games for Auburn last season. As of now, he's not expected by prognosticators to be selected in the 2025 NFL Draft.
