The seamy underbelly of college basketball has always existed, despite the halfhearted and mostly futile efforts by the NCAA to make sure everybody plays fair.
Now that it’s finally been penetrated by real lawmen, the only question is how many people the FBI ends up taking down.
The number stood at 10 Tuesday after federal prosecutors moved to arrest, among others, a top Adidas executive, and assistant basketball coaches from Arizona, Auburn, the University of Southern California and Oklahoma State. They are charged in a bribery scheme to steer future NBA players toward selected sports agents and financial advisers.
But with mentions of people associated with the University of Louisville and University of Miami caught on wiretaps scheming to pay players as much as $150,000 to come to their schools, there figures to be a lot of nervous people in college basketball waiting for the other, er, shoe to drop.
Make no mistake about it. These aren’t bumbling NCAA inspectors leading the investigation into shady agents, shoe companies and unscrupulous coaches.
These are FBI agents and U.S. attorneys with great powers of both subpoena and persuasion. Their investigation is not done and anyone leaning on the fence about whether to cooperate will have to balance their loyalty to programs with the very real fact they might go to prison if they don’t fess up.
And fess up they will. A day of reckoning may be coming for some big programs, and some big-name coaches.
If the allegations are true - and there seem to be a lot of wiretaps supporting them - it could also mean the end of Rick Pitino’s coaching career and possibly the end of Louisville’s powerhouse basketball program.
Yes, it looks as if Pitino is in trouble again, just months after the NCAA ordered the school to vacate its 2013 national title because strippers danced and performed sex acts for recruits and players. Pitino was also suspended for five conference games and the school’s basketball program put on four years’ probation, actions he claimed were unjust because he said he knew nothing about what was going on.
Defiant then, he claims to be shocked now. Pitino issued an incredibly tone-deaf statement Tuesday blaming “a few bad actors,” and painting the university and his program as victims of a “third-party scheme.”
Guess you can only blame rogue assistant coaches for so long.
Louisville is the school named in the complaint as University 6, where the family of a top basketball recruit was allegedly promised $100,000 in late May or early June if he signed with the school. The FBI said it recorded a meeting in July where an assistant coach at Louisville was briefed on a plan to funnel thousands of dollars to the recruit’s family, and the participants in the meeting noted they had to be careful because Louisville was already on probation.
According to the complaint filed in the Southern District of New York, the money was to be funneled through Adidas, whose director of basketball marketing was charged in the filing. Just last month, Louisville and Adidas reached agreement on a 10-year, $160 million contract to equip and sponsor the school’s sports teams.
Louisville announced on June 3 the unexpected signing of recruit Brian Bowen, who hadn’t been considering the university previously. Pitino at the time bragged to a local radio station he didn’t have to spend a dime on recruiting visits for Bowen.
“In my 40 years coaching this is the luckiest I’ve ever been,” Pitino said.
Pitino may not be feeling so lucky now. If the allegations are proven the NCAA may have no choice but to can Pitino and give Louisville the death penalty, eliminating basketball at the perennial national contender.
Just as interesting were details in the complaint that outed Miami as the university where Adidas and another unnamed apparel company were involved in a bidding war for a 2018 recruit that reached $150,000.
The allegations shouldn’t be a shock to anyone who has been around an incestuous sport laden with snake oil shoe salesmen, millionaire coaches and sleazy recruiters. It’s a place where business has always been conducted with handfuls of cash behind closed doors, with the powerless NCAA seemingly unable to do anything but count the billion dollars or so it gets each year for allowing the scam.
Now it’s being exposed in a way that not long ago would have been unfathomable. Now people are likely going to be sent to prison instead of being scolded by the NCAA.
That’s a seismic change in the way punishment is handed out in big-time college athletics.
And it should make a lot of people in the sport very nervous.
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Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg@ap.org or https://twitter.com/timdahlberg
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