The NCAA will start selling data from its championship events to sportsbooks around the country, part of an expanded partnership between the college sports governing body and Genius Sports.

The move, announced Friday, represents a notable departure from the NCAA’s prior arms-length relationship with legal sports betting. While the major pro U.S. leagues have built lucrative commercial partnerships in betting—including data deals like this one—the NCAA has stayed almost entirely on the sidelines. Instead, its executives have been outspoken about the industry’s effect on athletes, and pushed legislation that would limit the types of college bets that are permitted.

Under the new partnership, Genius Sports (NYSE: GENI) will have the right to sell live data from all NCAA championships through 2032. That includes the men’s and women’s March Madness basketball tournaments, the most valuable assets in the NCAA’s portfolio. Regular season contests, and FBS football postseason games like the College Football Playoff, are not included.

Genius is not paying an additional fee for the sportsbook rights, according to someone familiar with the details. The two sides will continue under the revenue share laid out in their original 2018 agreement, said the person, who was granted anonymity because the details are private. Genius announced the deal in a filing on Friday morning; a representative for the NCAA didn’t respond to a request for comment on the financial terms.

The announcement comes four months after NCAA president Charlie Baker spoke at a Senate hearing in Washington, D.C., urging Congress to reign in sports betting. He said the NCAA had to provide one team a 24/7 security detail because of a threat from a gambler, and added that hundreds of athletes have told him they’ve been approached to alter their performance. The NCAA in October released the results of a study conducted with Signify Group regarding online harassment of college athletes. The study found that “angry sports bettors” made up at least 12% of public social media abuse, making it one of the most common ways college athletes are harassed.

Paradoxically, the deal may help the NCAA build a larger bulwark against one of its major gambling concerns. Baker has been outspoken about a ban on athlete-specific prop bets, citing their impact on athletes and danger for match-fixing. Under this expanded agreement, Genius will establish an Authorized Gaming License (AGL), under which sportsbooks can access official NCAA feeds and logos. The operators in that program will also agree to limit “risky bet types,” the announcement says, though it is not specific on what it considers risky.

Tim Buckley, the NCAA’s senior vice president for external affairs, said in a statement that the agreement will include a ban on “high-risk proposition bets, specifically underperformance wagers, negative outcome bets and wagers on injuries, officials’ decisions or fan-voted awards.”

“NCAA data will only be available to sportsbooks if they remove risky bets from their platforms and agree to fully cooperate with NCAA investigations and provide key information including geolocation data and device records,” he said. “The NCAA retains the right to terminate any sportsbook data license if integrity protections are violated.”

The NCAA added that this deal was not an endorsement of legal sports betting, and that it will maintain its restrictions on gambling advertising and sponsorships. The governing body also said it would use revenue from the data sales to further education around problem gambling and to monitor gambling-related harassment of athletes.

The NCAA reported $1.38 billion in revenue in fiscal 2024, the majority of it from its media contract with CBS and Turner to broadcast the men’s basketball tournament, and has been looking to diversify its income streams. It’s unclear how the revenue sharing works between the two sides.

Under the new Genius deal, the NCAA’s LiveStats platform will remain free for member schools, and the company will use its AI platform, GeniusIQ, to enhance the feed’s real-time analytics, coaching insights and fan-facing uses. It also includes integrity services that monitor betting patterns for potential fraud.

Data deals have been one of the more lucrative ways that sports leagues and governing bodies have profited off the growing legal betting market in the U.S. The NFL, for example, has a deal with Genius Sports that included cash and at least $450 million in stock at the time of signing. Sportradar’s deals with the NBA and MLB include equity as well.

In college sports, however, these deals have been harder to secure. It’s slightly less clear who actually owns all the data—is it schools, conferences, bowl games?—and it wasn’t until the NCAA clarified its position in April 2022 that anyone felt comfortable signing deals whatsoever. A few smaller conferences have gambling data partnerships, but the bigger ones have spent multiple years in conversations with companies like Genius Sports without any agreements being reached. As a result, the data powering much of college sports betting is collected via low-latency video feeds, or in-person scouting. Sportico examined this specific market, and the changing economics, in a story in October 2023.

The NCAA was one of the major sports entities that spent years fighting the more widespread legalization of sports betting in the U.S. When that fight ended in 2018, it kept the industry at arm’s length. For the past seven years, there’s been no gambling data deal, nor any “Official Sportsbook of the NCAA” type partnerships. A few colleges signed sponsorship deals with operators, but those were all unwound after public and political backlash. When the NCAA held the men’s Final Four at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans in 2022, it concealed all of the gambling company’s advertising.

More recently, the NCAA has been vocal about the harassment of athletes due to betting. In a related push, the organization has been encouraging state lawmakers to restrict the number of markets for college sports contests. In particular, Baker has called for a ban on athlete-specific prop bets.

“I despise the idea that we put these kids in the position where people would expect their individual performance to be more important than the performance of their team,” Baker told ESPN in October.

The NCAA has had a relationship with Genius since 2018, when it signed a 10-year deal to take NCAA data and package it for broadcasters and fan sites. That work will also now continue until 2032. The partnership put Genius in pole position if/when the NCAA ever decided to expand its data customers to include sportsbooks. The company’s other partners include MLB, the PGA Tour, the Premier League and the NFL.

Recent consolidation in sports data has left Genius and Sportradar as a near duopoly in the U.S. Genius stock has more than doubled in the past 12 months, and 22% so far this calendar year, bucking broader market volatility.

The NCAA does not control the College Football Playoff or the top bowl games, but it does organize almost every other major college championship. That includes men’s and women’s March Madness, of course, but also collegiate lacrosse, softball, baseball, ice hockey, volleyball and wrestling, just to name a few.  

(This story has been updated with comment from the NCAA.)