NCAA faces a kill shot of scandals at SJSU

Males on women's teams challenge the integrity of women's sports. Point shaving, targeting, and conspiring shatter the integrity of sport itself.

Sports integrity monitoring systems examine massive amounts of data in real time, looking for any discrepancies in two correlated-but-better-not-be-too-correlated data sets: in-game actions and betting markets.

Team sports are less amenable than individual sports (tennis, in particular) to the kind of interference that can swing games. Only a few players — goalkeepers or pitchers, for example — are in a position to decisively, but not too obviously, sway the outcome of a match against their team (but then there are these guys). Even so, prop bets remain a major betting market, and these offer a lot of opportunities for athletes to affect a bettor's take.

The NCAA Division I 2024-25 Manual makes it clear that the NCAA understands the risk that betting presents to the integrity of collegiate sports.

Sports wagering comprises the bulk of Article 10 of the Bylaws on Ethical Conduct. The only other specific infraction that receives its own section is "Knowledge of Use of Banned Drugs." The other examples of unethical conduct involve improper inducements, financial arrangements, providing false information about one's amateur status, or competing "under an assumed name or with intent to otherwise deceive."

It's almost as if the writers of this policy, and the committee members who reviewed and approved it, couldn't think of other reasons why a player would shave points or otherwise actively undermine their own team.

Two more concepts absent from the Manual: targeting, and conspiring with an opponent.

Yet all three — point shaving, targeting, and conspiring with an opponent — are part of the developing story with San Jose State University's women's volleyball team.

Quillette's Jonathan Kay reported that SJSU’s assistant coach Melissa Batie-Smoose alleged in a Title IX complaint that the Spartans' Blaire Fleming met with Colorado State's Malaya Jones the night before San Jose State played Colorado State.

During the subsequent game, "Fleming allowed Jones an unhindered diagonal hitting lane that exposed [SJSU's Brooke] Slusser to kills... Fleming gave Jones the SJSU scouting report, and the two engineered a plan to leave the centre of the court open so that Jones would be able to target Slusser with powerful spikes in an unhindered fashion." Quillette updated the article with a video showing one such undefended kill by Jones towards Slusser.

From a statistical perspective — what a sports integrity monitoring system would look at — this game was more unusual for Fleming than Jones.

Attack percentage in volleyball is the total number of kills minus the total number of errors, divided by the total number of attacks. Fleming's attack percentage in the game against Colorado State was .095, his second lowest of the season. His ratio of kills-to-errors (K:E, which is independent of total attacks) was also his second lowest of the season.

The driver of those two stats was his 10 errors, the most he's made in a single game all season. Coming into that game, Fleming had an average of 4.7 errors per game. His 10 errors against Colorado State were over two standard deviations above the mean — the sort of discrepancy, in tandem with attack percentage and K:E ratio, that could raise a data integrity bot's virtual eyebrows.

Players can have off nights. They can have games where some things are working for them and other things aren’t. Fleming’s 14 kills against Colorado State were right at his average (13.3), as were his total points.

Another Spartan who had a bit of an off night was Brooke Slusser, the first Spartan to go public with her concerns about Fleming, and who joined a lawsuit against the NCAA alleging Title IX violations against female athletes. Slusser had only a single point, which was two standard deviations less than her average of 7.2 per game. She also had just one kill, which was just within two standard deviations of her average of 5.7 per game.

Even the most anomalous stat, on its own, proves nothing. There’s equal danger in over-weighting and ignoring outliers. Understanding patterns is crucial, as is setting the data into context, especially when dealing with sports stats — there are enough “Excel coaches” out there who think they can read a game because they can read a spreadsheet.

The context of the Colorado State game is part of the analysis. In tandem with Quillette’s reporting, some anomalous stats acquire evidentiary value and warrant a closer look, such as video from the game.

On the other side of the net, Fleming's alleged conspirator Mayala Jones had a rather average performance. Her kills, errors, attack percentage, and K:E were all very close to her average. And Jones' average is not particularly average: she leads her team in kills (170 more than the second highest player), and is top five on the Rams for assists, aces, digs, and blocks.

She wouldn’t need outside help to put in a performance like she did against San Jose State.

That raises all sorts of questions about why Jones would meet with Fleming and accept his offer. It’s also unknown who initiated the interaction: did Fleming reach out to Jones, or vice versa?

Perhaps Fleming and Jones go way back and have known each other from the youth volleyball circuit, and Fleming just disregarded the team’s curfew rules to see an old friend. Batie-Smoose wrote that “Blaire sent an over pass, perfectly setting up Malaya to kill the ball again in the direction of Brooke Slusser, after [which] Jones blew a kiss toward Fleming and mouthed ‘thank you.’” That might have been a legitimate mistake by Fleming, to which Jones responded with a bit of taunting, maybe good natured, maybe edgy.

The outcome of that game puts Colorado State ahead of San Jose State in the Mountain West Conference standings, moving Colorado State closer to their first conference title since their undefeated 2019 season. That title was also the Rams' 10th in 11 years.

Again, Jones wouldn’t need any help from the opponent to lead her team to victory. If things went down as Batie-Smoose described, Jones set herself up to answer the haunting question: And for what? Not that cheating is ever worth it, of course, but from a quantitative perspective, unless someone more sleuthy than me uncovers a massive swing of a betting line tied to the Bulgarian underworld, this was cheating for the sake of cheating, conspiring for the sake of conspiring, targeting for the sake of targeting.

All of these possibilities leave both schools, the Mountain West Conference, and the NCAA facing one of the most dire integrity scandals in collegiate sports history. It's so severe that it can and arguably should overwhelm the fact that Blaire Fleming is a male on a women's team. Somehow, that's become the third or fourth most egregious element at play here.

Most of the incidents in listicles about the worst scandals in NCAA history involve some combination of sex (the act, not the category), drugs, or money. The infamous "death penalty" imposed upon Southern Methodist University's football team was the result of inappropriate recruiting featuring under-the-table payments. There are very few where an athlete threw the game; and in those, as is the case around the world, there were bookies or criminals behind it. Those incidents resulted in fines, teams being suspended from competition, titles being revoked, and, in some cases, jail time.

Broadening our view to professional sports, the San Jose State - Colorado State controversy feels like a combination of the New Orleans Saints bounty scandal and the quintessential American sports scandal, the 1919 Chicago Black Sox. Another that feels close is NBA referee Tim Donaghy. But he, too, was at least betting on his own games and manipulating the spread. He could put a dollar amount on his integrity, career, and, ultimately, criminal record.

Masters & Sex

In the sports world, throwing a game is the closest thing we have to malum in se. Everything else —offsides, salary caps, tuck rules, Financial Fair Play, even doping regulations, and even bounties and targeting — are malum prohibitum: we've developed rules around these subjects to ensure fairness, integrity, competitiveness, and player safety. But none of them challenge the fundamental nature and assumptions of sport the way fixing / throwing / shaving does.

While I'm slinging around terms I learned in my one year of law school, the presence of a male on a women's team may be the least worst thing going on here, but there is "but for" causality linking them all. But for Blaire Fleming's presence on the team, none of this would have happened. No point shaving, no targeting, no conspiracy in advance of either. No Title IX complaint by an assistant coach, no exposé in Quillette, no retaliation by the university against said assistant coach.

That puts the ultimate responsibility for this whole situation with the NCAA. Their failure to protect women's sports over the last decade set these events in motion. Perhaps their root cause culpability should mitigate whatever punishment they eventually mete out against the schools and players involved.

The question for the NCAA's Board of Governors, policy makers, and the sports industry and profession is how will we hold the NCAA itself accountable?