In case there were any lingering doubts as to whether the NCAA thinks buying sports event contracts on Kalshi constitutes regular old sports betting, here’s the answer: It does.

This non-surprising result is based on the fact that a University of Tennessee student, who worked on the sports broadcast team, was fired from his job because an NCAA report revealed the unnamed student placed a bet on the Tennessee football team using Kalshi, according to a report on Knox News.

The news site obtained the report via a public records request that showed five other NCAA violations, although this was the only gambling-related one. According to the report, the student bet on NFL, NBA, and college football games on Kalshi in October 2025 and at least one of those bets was on Tennessee. 

The student-worker did not work with any one team; instead, he was a cameraman and filmed live content.

Rules are rules

Despite Kalshi calling its product “financial markets but for real-world events,” the NCAA takes a more common-sense view and views the action as bets. As such, the student broke NCAA rules that prohibit anyone involved in athletics from betting on sports, college or otherwise.

Of course, in November, the NCAA relaxed that rule, allowing people connected to college athletics to bet on pro sports (but not college). That rule change lasted all of three weeks.

The offending bet was reported to the University of Tennessee in November by ProhiBet, a monitoring service used by the SEC. The student-worker was suspended, then fired, in an “institutional decision,” according to reporting by Knox News.

No additional penalties were imposed on the university. 

Kalshi and the NCAA haven’t exactly been besties in recent months, culminating in December when the nascent prediction market — as first reported by InGame — was set to begin offering contracts on the player transfer portal.

This yielded an angry response from NCAA President Charlie Baker.

“The NCAA vehemently opposes college sports prediction markets,” Baker wrote. “It is already bad enough that student-athletes face harassment and abuse for lost bets on game performance, and now Kalshi wants to offer bets on their transfer decisions and status — this is absolutely unacceptable and would place even greater pressure on student-athletes, while threatening competition integrity and recruiting processes. Their decisions and future should not be gambled with, especially in an unregulated marketplace that does not follow any rules of legitimate sports betting operators.”

Kalshi then rescinded its plans for the portal wagers.