Bettors spotted a rare stat-keeping mistake in a college basketball game this past weekend that persisted through to the final score. After the score was corrected, some sportsbooks decided to pay out wagers on both sides.
It was a game that not a whole lot of people paid attention to besides alumni of the schools and fans of the Missouri Valley and Western Athletic Conferences: a non-conference matchup between Illinois State and Chicago State. Illinois State was a heavy 9.5 or 10-point favorite, depending on the sportsbook. They won, 80-71 and thus did not cover the spread. Or did they?
Illinois State’s Josiah Strong drained a free throw with 49 seconds left in the game, but for some reason, the official scorer failed to record the point. Often, a slight statistical error wouldn’t matter and would be quietly corrected later, but in this case, not only was it the final score that was wrong, but it was the tilting point between winning and losing bets. Illinois State really won 81-71 and thus those who bet on the team either should have won their bets or pushed.
According to ESPN’s report, team scorers usually cross-check their stats with the official scorer to make sure everything is correct. In this case, Chicago State’s statistics crew’s score did not match the official scorer’s; the school is working with the NCAA to fix things.
But before the error was caught, Genius Sports, the official “data disseminator” for the NCAA, had already proliferated the score to sportsbooks. The books paid out Chicago State bets, but because it affected bets, bettors certainly noticed it.
On Monday, Caesars Sportsbook and PointsBet announced that they would pay bettors on both scores, 81-71 and 80-71.
“In this case, we’ve let all bets be winners, the ones that were with the incorrect score and the ones that would’ve won with the correction,” Jay Croucher, PointsBet’s director of trading told ESPN. “There’s kind of a statute of limitations, where we don’t want to basically be coming after people’s money two days later, particularly on a game like that.”
Neither sportsbooks will lose much money in the grand scheme of things, as this would not have been a heavily-bet game, but the goodwill they will earn with their customers should be worth something.
As mentioned, a statistical error like this – one that results in an incorrect final score – is rare. Mistakes happen, but ESPN reports that errors in halftime scores are the most common. Slight discrepancies in individual stats also occur sometimes and those often don’t get corrected for days.
