Many sports fans last week seemed surprised and upset when news broke of the most recent college basketball scandal.
Many sports fans last week seemed surprised and upset when news broke of the most recent college basketball scandal.
People who follow it have speculated for years whether the fact that the NCAA allows shoe companies to recruit players for colleges would ever become an issue. Last week, the FBI announced it had uncovered a network of decades of shoe company payoffs that essentially channel certain elite players to certain elite schools.
Elite college basketball programs? If you follow the sport, you know who they are.
The disillusionment in this case isn’t just that shoe companies pay off summer league and travel team AAU coaches with enough cash to lure their top players to colleges with contracts connecting them to those same sneaker suppliers. Most people who even casually follow college basketball understand the heavy impact shoe companies have on the game.
The most notable aspect of this scandal is that the NCAA looked the other way for so long.
Since the announcement last week, social media has been rife with comments from fans and even some media members suggesting they are suddenly turned off by the game. They say they’re done with it, they can’t support it anymore, they thought people had more credibility than this.
Which makes me want to understand what kind of antiseptic, blindfolded fairy-tale world in which these folks live.
Here’s the thing. If you were a big college basketball fan last year and the year before and for as long as you can remember, nothing has changed. It’s the same game going into the 2017-18 season as it was a year ago.
“The surprise, to me,” said University of Hawaii at Hilo men’s basketball coach GE Coleman, “is that this stuff is just now coming out.
“I’ve never seen it, but I know as long as I’ve been around it — when my dad coached and I was just a kid — I’ve heard these kind of stories. You would always hear about certain schools, certain coaches and you hear it long enough and you assume at least some of it must be true.”
Coleman’s father Gil was an assistant for Dean Nicholson at Central Washington University where Coleman eventually enrolled. Gil Coleman also coached at Juanita High School, east of Seattle and no doubt heard plenty of recruiting stories throughout his career, some of them about Nicholson himself.
For the record, according to an athletic department representative, Hawaii Hilo has a standard five-year deal with Under Armor that pays the school no money but grants the Vulcans some free gear and discounts.
It’s a different world in Division II because the shoe companies are investing only in the potential college recruits they feel are in the “can’t miss” category.
The supply chain is simple enough. Well-connected AAU coaches are paid fat salaries by shoe manufacturers. When they send top recruits to the right school, they get more money. How much is given to the players is clearly unknown, but it’s probably fair to say they are given enough to command their attention.
Conveniently, the NCAA is part of an NBA policy that basketball players only have to attend one year of college before taking a professional offer, the loosest such requirement in all of the team sports, and that’s where public awareness, if not the investigation itself, should be looking.
The NCAA essentially tells shoe companies and their agents to do whatever they want, while using colleges as a one-year springboard to the NBA, where the shoe company coach/agent becomes the players’ financial agent.
The current flood of money that floats college basketball should be blamed on university chancellors and presidents themselves. The fish does, indeed, rot from the head in college basketball.
Back in 1992, the National Association of Basketball Coaches submitted a proposal that would have taken nine regional summer AAU camps out of the hands of shoe companies and put them in the control of the NCAA. It would have cost the NCAA around $500,000 a year, a cost to be shared by the hundreds of colleges in the organization.
The proposal went to the presidents, the ones ultimately in charge of maintaining credibility and respect for both our public and private universities. When the football coach gets picked up for driving while impaired, when players get in legal predicaments that go public, it all reflects on the school president. Who better to resolve the issue that basketball coaches saw coming almost 20 years ago?
The President’s Committee opposed the suggestion, citing the increased costs to schools, and took the position that it preferred letting the shoe companies to continue to run the summer programs.
And here we are.
So when you see the stories spilling out about coaches taking money and high schoolers and college kids taking money, you can blame them if you want, but keep in mind, it was the presidents that left the front door open and a welcome mat on the porch.
Louisville, where coach Rick Pitino was just put on “leave” — administrative mumbo jumbo for “fired” — has a 10-year deal with Adidas that will pay $164 million. Pitino, who began his career as an assistant at UH-Manoa and left a trail of eight recruiting violations, was being paid $7.7 million after somehow maintaining his job following a scandal in 2003 that involved intimate relations with a waitress on a restaurant table. He also survived a sex scandal involving his players and prostitutes from 2010-2014.
Pitino almost didn’t get the head coaching job at Kentucky back in 1989 because of his history at UH-Manoa, but he can be a personally charming individual, his coaching ability is almost beyond criticism. His response to the concerns about his NCAA violations left no space for misunderstanding back in 1989.
“There is no one in this business with more integrity than Rick Pitino,” he said back then. Local newspapers ran the quote, fans already wanted him. He got hired. He won, big.
School presidents, with university image on their minds 24/7, like winners. All the big powerhouse athlete factories are in on it.
Michigan has an 11-year contract with Nike that pays $164 million and UCLA has a 15-year contract with Under Armor worth $280 million.
Last week, former Duke standout Jay Williams, a protege of Mike Krzyzewski, who used to receive money to sell cars on television commercials saying he’s not a coach, he’s a leader of young men, made an alarming statement. Williams admitted publicly that when he worked for an agency in 2007-09, he personally paid an AAU coach $250,000 to get Kevin Love to sign with the right school. Love didn’t, but the AAU coach got to keep the money, for trying.
This is not the tip of the iceberg as much as it is a small glimpse at a tiny spot on the tip of the iceberg. The FBI has identified a number of coaches and others it believes are at guilt, but these are the little guys, the ones who did the bidding.
With 40 years and more of a possible prison sentence for most of them, you can be sure they will start to squeal for a lesser sentence. Above them, names will fall, institutions will be degraded and ridiculed, and in time, football will be a part of it as it moves along.
It’s going to be a nightmare to explain for the college presidents and chancellors who stepped back and rolled out the red carpet almost 20 years ago.
Tips? Questions? Contact Bart at barttribuneherald@gmail.com