A D1 Institution Discreetly Accepts Sportswear Bribery

September 26, 2017 11:06 AM

The FBI has arrested 10 individuals on charges of fraud and corruption in NCAA D1 men's basketball. Assistant coaches at Arizona, Auburn, USC, and Oklahoma State have been arrested and charged in a variety of corruption and bribery schemes, including paying prospects to attend schools sponsored by Adidas and taking bribes to direct collegiate players to specific agents and financial managers.

Business Insider:

Jim Gatto, the director of global sports marketing for basketball at Adidas, was among the defendants. Gatto is accused of conspiring with coaches to pay high-school athletes to play at universities sponsored by Adidas (referred to as "Company 1" in the case)...

... In one instance, Gatto and the other defendants are accused of funneling $100,000 to the family of a high-school basketball player to persuade the player to sign with a "public research university" in Kentucky. An undercover agent investigating the case said Gatto told other defendants that the payment was "on the books" at Adidas but "not on the books for what it's actually for."

The complaint doesn't name the university, but, based on details provided, it is most likely Louisville, which signed a $160 million sponsorship deal with Adidas in August.

LA Times:

Prosecutors allege [USC assistant coach Tony] Bland met with Christian Dawkins, a former sports agent trying to start his own firm, and an undercover FBI agent on July 29 in a Las Vegas hotel room. Bland said any university players who he controlled would be “coming to” Dawkins. The coach added he had “heavy influence” over his school’s players choosing agents and advisors.

They also discussed the need to “take care of” two USC players referred to in the complaint as “Player-8” and “Player-9.” The players were identified as a freshman and a sophomore.

In the room, Dawkins took an envelope containing $13,000 and said he would give it to Bland. The two men left the room together.

CNBC: Shares of Adidas fell more than 2 percent in Germany and the U.S. after the report.

posted by Existential Dread (56 comments total)

If the result of this is that kids actually got paid to play basketball I'm going to have a hard time getting mad about this.
posted by Space Coyote at 11:09 AM on September 26, 2017 [35 favorites]

How to fix match-fixing
Match-fixing is more common than ever

(2 related articles from the Economist)
posted by chavenet at 11:11 AM on September 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

And all this could have been stopped if the NCAA didn't have a policy that was found to be an illegal restraint of the right to counsel.

Fuck the NCAA.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:12 AM on September 26, 2017 [12 favorites]

You can bet this is the tip of the iceberg. These are just the first programs charged.
posted by Ironmouth at 11:16 AM on September 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Hasn't the FBI got anything better to do?
posted by w0mbat at 11:18 AM on September 26, 2017 [5 favorites]

I dunno, I think fraud and exploitation of students by highly paid state employees is well within their mandate.

I agree that these athletes should be compensated for the revenue they earn for their universities, but it should be above-board and formalized, so that all athletes get compensated appropriately. These coaches are clearly soliciting bribes to direct athletes to specific agents and managers, and the hammer should come down on them.
posted by Existential Dread at 11:23 AM on September 26, 2017 [46 favorites]

Deadspin has more detail.

I agree that these athletes should be compensated for the revenue they earn for their universities, but it should be above-board and formalized, so that all athletes get compensated appropriately. These coaches are clearly soliciting bribes to direct athletes to specific agents and managers, and the hammer should come down on them.

Yes, but at the same time, they're a symptom of a larger problem - namely the NCAA treating college athletes poorly, refusing to pay them or to even let them have agent representation. Going after the coaches doesn't fix the actual problem.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:28 AM on September 26, 2017 [8 favorites]

Pitino is a piece of garbage, and knows where some bodies are buried for the NCAA and U of L. It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, happens to him.
posted by glaucon at 11:28 AM on September 26, 2017 [5 favorites]

Been bouncing around all the local fan sports sites (Arizona) trying to get a sense of where this is going.

The sense I'm getting is that the storied Arizona Wildcats men's basketball program is going to burn to the ground. The Athletic Director who hired coach Miller fled the school last year. The university itself has a new president. Why wouldn't they want to flush the corruption out entirely? Wipe their slate clean, and build their own program?

I'm on two sides for this though: Pay College Athletes / Fuck Money

The source of this corruption is money 'managers' who crave the thrill of gambling with other people's money. They hoover up accounts, always pursuing large leads, and take their cut whether or not they perform well for their clients. Of course they're going to follow their corrupt, greedy hearts into the soft flesh of (soon to be) over-paid and (currently) under-educated youth athletes. You can follow that spirit of greed right up to the top of the U.S. Financial World Shitpile.
posted by carsonb at 11:42 AM on September 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

Going after coaches who actively abuse the currently abusive system seems worthwhile. And getting more attention to this can probably only be good at getting real reform done (I laugh at that idea too.)
posted by skynxnex at 11:43 AM on September 26, 2017

Just for clarification, USC in the articles refers to the Trojans, not the Gamecocks.

College sports are horribly corrupt (at least the big money ones). It would be great to see this expand to include football. And the students who get caught up in these scandals are of course the ones from impoverished backgrounds, not the ones from middle/upper class backgrounds who can go to college with cars, spending money, etc. Which also correlates with race, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
posted by TedW at 11:44 AM on September 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

The NBA needs to expand its Developmental League into a full-fledged minor league system and drop its age requirement back down to 18.
posted by Groundhog Week at 11:53 AM on September 26, 2017 [10 favorites]

The source of this corruption is money 'managers' who crave the thrill of gambling with other people's money.

No, the source of this corruption is the NCAA, which refuses to actually deal with the issue of athlete compensation in a fair, transparent, and above the board manner, leading to all these under the table dealings. It's like the Black Sox Scandal - everyone chastises the players for taking money to fix the game, while ignoring the fact that management refused to pay them properly.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:03 PM on September 26, 2017 [22 favorites]

More specifically, if the only "job training" program for the NBA is college, then this will continue to occur. The NBA has the revenue to train their own employees.
posted by Groundhog Week at 12:04 PM on September 26, 2017 [8 favorites]

My alma mater plays both Louisville and Arizona this upcoming season, Louisville at home. Looking forward to the signs the students come up with for that game :)

Pitino is a piece of garbage, and knows where some bodies are buried for the NCAA and U of L. It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, happens to him.

I'm going to guess 2 game suspension, served during charity season when they are beating up on Div II / smaller schools.
posted by COD at 12:05 PM on September 26, 2017

Shiiiiiiit. University of Louisville is already in trouble for bringing in prostitutes to entertain high school recruits a few years ago. This will be ugly.

On the one hand, U of L is hugely important for the city, already reeling from financial scandals under former President Ramsey and attacks by our fuck-face governor, and many people I care about live and breathe Cardinal sports.

On the over hand, I hate the corrupt NCAA, and it is way past time for U of L to clean house from top to bottom. Pass the popcorn.
posted by chaoticgood at 12:26 PM on September 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

it is way past time for U of L to clean house from top to bottom

QFT.
posted by Gelatin at 1:21 PM on September 26, 2017

On the over hand, I hate the corrupt NCAA, and it is way past time for U of L to clean house from top to bottom. Pass the popcorn.

BOBBY PETRINO FOR AD!!1!
posted by Huffy Puffy at 1:58 PM on September 26, 2017

*grabs popcorn* *also grabs cyanide pill*
posted by fleacircus at 2:01 PM on September 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

At All Costs Is a fascinating documentary about being a NATIONALLY RANKED HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL PLAYER; the kind that gets recruited for shoe deals.

In high school.

But then, chumps who aren't serious play for their high school team. The rising stars, the ones who train like full-grown adults in high school, they're on the road with the AAU tournaments & camps. Where the big money scouts & coaches are.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 2:28 PM on September 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Who had Bobby Petrino as the last guy standing at Louisville? Wouldn't have called that.

Louisville has been playing with fire for 15 years, there's a LOT wrong at that school, from the former President using the booster fund as a slush account, to the self-dealing arena project that fucked over the city and state tax payers, to the parade of tawdry sex scandals, now to paying players on an FBI wire tap, while already on NCAA probation. This has been a long, long time coming for Louisville. Say what your want about the NCAA and its fucked up problems, but Louisville has been one of the most flagrant offenders for years along with maybe Baylor, and if they don't bring the hammer down now, they might as well just disband the organization.

The arena really complicates things. The program deserves the NCAA death penalty. If not for this, then it shouldn't exist. But doing something that drastic would sink the entire University's budget and have ripple effects for the entire city's economy. I don't see how it could be practical.

KY sports twitter says a big announcement is happening tomorrow and Pitinio put out a statement tonight through his personal lawyer. Louisville has a new President who was already trying to turn a new page and clean up the school's garbage reputation. The whole school used to be run by the AD Tom Jurich, Ramsey was little more than the bag man. That's changed, and the statement released today said nothing would be said by the athletics department, it was all through the new president's office. They need to wipe the slate clean tomorrow, fire Pitino and the entire basketball staff to a man, then open the books up to the NCAA and FBI. It's time to get down and pray forgiveness, at long last.
posted by T.D. Strange at 4:59 PM on September 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

At times like these I sing to myself the traditional English soccer song:

Sacked in the morning
You're getting' sacked in the morning
Sacked in the mooorning
You're gettin' sacked in the mooorning...

[It's only slightly more linguistically complex than "Boomer Sooner"]
posted by Huffy Puffy at 5:09 PM on September 26, 2017

Oh, and this is probably just the beginning, the FBI also raided the offices of a major NBA agent today And siezed computers.
posted by T.D. Strange at 5:15 PM on September 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm going to need a lot of popcorn. We're just getting started, I bet.
posted by kevinbelt at 5:25 PM on September 26, 2017

The money in college sports is crazy in multiple ways. I would like players to be paid. At least one problem, though. Most big-time university sports programs already lose money (see here, here, and here). My university spent something like $6.2 million more on athletics than athletics brought in last year. So, I would like to pay the players. But I would also like to see the overall budget for sports cut: in the case of my university, a cut of probably 10% would be good. In order to pay the players, cuts to other operating expenses would have to be even deeper to keep a balanced budget. And nobody with any power is going to agree even to the initial cut, let alone a further cut for the sake of paying players. This while the head football coach here is paid, on average, $3.5 million each year, which is (I'm pretty sure) just a bit more than my entire department costs to operate.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 6:34 PM on September 26, 2017 [9 favorites]

The End of the Pitino Era is Upon Us

After UL self-imposed probation two years ago (a decision that privately Pitino and UL Athletics people sought to have fans blast then-President Ramsey for), I and others said that the only way for UL to get past the Katina Powell scandal was to clean house and bring a new regime. At any other University in America, that decision would have been obvious and immediate. Yet for reasons that now have become clearer, UL decided to deny and persevere…keeping the entire regime that led to the problems in the first place. Over the last two years, the effects of that decision have been made clear. The University has seen its President resign in disgrace, its Foundation has been raided of millions of dollars that are still missing and unaccounted for, its donor base has eroded to the point that paying the daily bills of the University is in jeopardy and now, an even larger basketball scandal that involves the FBI and pay-for-play has tarnished the University for decades. To an entire generation of college basketball fans, when you one thinks of scandal and rule-breaking, Louisville basketball will come to the forefront. With one quick rip of the band-aid off, this could have been avoided. But now even more pain is ahead.
...
Tomorrow the Pitino era likely ends and with it, a decade of UL sports that saw some of the greatest successes the University has ever known. Rick Pitino will stomp off into the sunset, likely angrily shouting his innocence of all charges, ignorance of the facts at hand and overall unfairness of the situation to him. But he is no victim and he certainly is no martyr. His fall is great because his scandalous reign sustained solely by absolute power and fear, inevitably led to his ultimate downfall. He will leave the University in worse shape than when he arrived and with a second fan base that once adored him, now looking away in shame. Rick Pitino, one of the top college coaches in the history of the profession, is now destined to be remembered mostly as a cheater of epic proportions and a punchline to sexual stamina jokes. It is a sad ending, but unfortunately one well-earned.

posted by T.D. Strange at 6:45 PM on September 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

The obvious answer that will never happen is to pay the student/athletes out of the budget for the coaches' salaries. Any school that cries poor about having to pay their athletes needs to just look at the 7-figure deals that coaches are paid. The top paid state employee in 39 out of 50 states is a college football or basketball coach.

The other issue is the idea of parity - both within a sport and across all sports. Is the NCAA going to put a ridiculously low cap on student payments when they do happen because they want to have a system that both UNC and Elon can afford? Or should it be on a per-conference basis - if you can't stand the heat, get your football team out of the SEC?

And what happens to Title IX when male football and basketball players start getting paid because lots of schools argue that the money football and basketball bring in is what pays for women's sports (true or not) and they're going to use women's sports as a scapegoat to say no to paying the football players.
posted by thecjm at 7:09 PM on September 26, 2017 [9 favorites]

The obvious answer that will never happen is to pay the student/athletes out of the budget for the coaches' salaries.

No, it will happen once the NCAA gets (or more likely, is forced) out of the wage fixing business, because there WILL be a school willing to make that bargain to get top flight talent. Also, I fully expect that when that happens, a lot of the "process" coaches who rely on the bullshit NCAA eligibility rules to run their programs *cough*Nick Saban*cough* will retire rather than actually treat their players fairly.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:56 PM on September 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

The other issue is the idea of parity - both within a sport and across all sports.

No, because it's a non-issue - parity just doesn't exist in the NCAA, and only "remains" as a sick joke used to justify not paying players.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:57 PM on September 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

With the other stories that indicate this is just a part of a larger ongoing investigation, I wouldn't be even remotely surprised to see most big-name programs in the US involved. I was at the very fringes of college athletics for a while, and even the legal stuff is insanely sketchy.
posted by codacorolla at 8:08 AM on September 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

NY Daily News: Rick Pitino reportedly tells staff he expects to lose job as Louisville AD Tom Jurich fired

Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino knows he's getting the boot as the university reportedly fired athletic director Tom Jurich on Wednesday morning.

Pitino, who met with interim university president Greg Postel, told his coaching staff earlier that he expects to lose his job over recent allegations the Louisville basketball program is involved in a federal fraud and corruption investigation, according to ESPN, just the latest scandal involving the program.

A source told ESPN that Pitino "knows it's coming."

Postel told reporters there will be a press conference at 1 p.m. Neither Jurich nor Pitino commented after leaving his own meeting with Postel.

posted by Existential Dread at 8:29 AM on September 27, 2017

With the other stories that indicate this is just a part of a larger ongoing investigation, I wouldn't be even remotely surprised to see most big-name programs in the US involved. I was at the very fringes of college athletics for a while, and even the legal stuff is insanely sketchy.

And again, it's a problem that would be solved by the NCAA getting out of the wage fixing business.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:34 AM on September 27, 2017

Confirmed: Louisville AD Jurich was asked to fire Coach Pitino. Refused. AD fired. Pitino fired.
posted by Barack Spinoza at 8:39 AM on September 27, 2017

Pitino has always been one of the most despicable people involved in college sports, and that’s saying something. When he was still the coach at UK, he was known throughout the university and the town for two things:
-taking very young female undergrads to his house, getting them drunk, and “hooking up” with them (I doubt that characterization and its implications of consent very much, but hey), and
-driving drunk all the time everywhere. Apparently the Lexington police would pull him over, see who it was, and give him a friendly escort home to make sure he didn’t get a ticket orrrrrr kill anyone.

This sting couldn’t destroy the career of anyone more deserving.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 8:49 AM on September 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

I've always rather enjoyed this LSUfreek gif of post-wreck Bobby Petrino and Rick Pitino as the Night at the Roxbury twits.
posted by Existential Dread at 8:52 AM on September 27, 2017

Came in to make the same update, Pitino fired. Unfortunately, the washpost story today (front page, under the fold) only showed photos of 4 black coaches :(
posted by k5.user at 9:04 AM on September 27, 2017

I'd like to see a simple fix to college athletics. I'd also like a pony.
posted by ZeusHumms at 9:46 AM on September 27, 2017

Also you charge the assistants to get them to flip on the coaches and ADs.
posted by Ironmouth at 9:48 AM on September 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'd like to see a simple fix to college athletics. I'd also like a pony.

If paying the athletes is a non-starter, why not double down in the other direction?

Unpaid student athletes. Unpaid student coaches. Games filmed and broadcast (on free public access, of course) by unpaid students from the A/V club. Matches between schools arranged and negotiated by each school's student run interscholastic affairs club.

And if a school can't get all of those things together, then just don't play football that year and spend more time on your studies.
posted by Uncle Ira at 12:00 PM on September 27, 2017 [6 favorites]

Unpaid student coaches.

Nah. Keep the current coaches, but just pay them in redeemable college credit hours.
posted by Groundhog Week at 12:16 PM on September 27, 2017 [7 favorites]

This piece argues that the FBI is just doing the NCAA's dirty work for them, by going after the players without attacking the artificial structure they're working in. As long as we fail to acknowledge what is happening and why this money is circulating, we'll never fix the problem.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:30 PM on September 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

"Unpaid student athletes. Unpaid student coaches. Games filmed and broadcast (on free public access, of course) by unpaid students from the A/V club. Matches between schools arranged and negotiated by each school's student run interscholastic affairs club."

This actually doesn't sound bad to me. One of my friends is a big cricket fan, and I used to accompany him to watch our alma mater's cricket club, which was organized like this (except for the filming and broadcasting - cricket isn't that popular). It was a good time. I have no idea if the players were any good, but that's not really what it was about. And while I'm a huge college football fan, that's not what it's about to me there, either. I'd be just as excited to watch random sociology majors play football, as long as we beat Michigan.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:50 PM on September 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

If you want a look at the level of corruption under the Ramsey/Jurich regime at Louisville consider what it's going to take to fire Jurich and Pitino:

1) Rick gets 10 days notice FOR CAUSE. Jurich gets 30 days.
2) Jurich has two separate contracts (besides his secret ones), and under one of those he still gets paid a year salary EVEN IF he's fired for cause
3) Rick is own nearly 50 million dollars under the contract extension he signed immediately before the hooker scandal
4) Rick has no buy out or firing provision without cause. If Louisville fires him, they will have to defend the lawsuit proving it was for cause, or he gets every dime.
posted by T.D. Strange at 5:52 PM on September 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

And again, it's a problem that would be solved by the NCAA getting out of the wage fixing business.

Paying market rate for athletes--that is, a handful six or seven figures and most almost nothing--won't fix the corruption.

Something like Uncle Ira's approach, to strip away the idea of direct and indirect income from the games, might work.
posted by mark k at 7:18 AM on September 28, 2017

Paying market rate for athletes--that is, a handful six or seven figures and most almost nothing--won't fix the corruption.

Something like Uncle Ira's approach, to strip away the idea of direct and indirect income from the games, might work.

The corruption stems from what should be an above-board market being driven underground, so yes, paying market rate for athletes in an open market would in fact fix the issue.

Also, I find it telling that for many of you, the "answer" to the NCAA devaluing the labor of predominantly minority and lower class athletes is to...devalue the labor of predominantly minority and lower class athletes, but while singing paeans to the "purity" of academia.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:34 AM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

Huh, it appears that Pitino is now directly implicated (caution, ESPN autoplaying video) as Coach-2 in the complaint.
posted by Existential Dread at 12:53 PM on September 28, 2017

4) Rick has no buy out or firing provision without cause. If Louisville fires him, they will have to defend the lawsuit proving it was for cause, or he gets every dime.

Presumably being indicted by the federal government for alleged crimes committed in the course of your normal job duties is cause, though? Not that I doubt that Pitino would fight it and generally make a nuisance of himself, but it really seems like his case would be incredibly weak.
posted by Copronymus at 1:36 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

Per T.D. Strange's comment above, Louisville is staring down the barrel of NCAA "repeat violator" penalties.

In addition, a repeat violator may be subject to any or all of the following penalties:
(a) The prohibition of all outside competition in the sport(s) involved in the latest major violation for one or two sport seasons and the prohibition of all coaching staff members in that sport(s) from involvement directly or indirectly in any coaching activities at the institution during that period;
(b) The elimination of all initial grants-in-aid and all recruiting activities in the sport(s) involved in the latest major violation(s) in question for up to a two-year period;
[and loss of committee memberships and/or voting rights]

For reference, the most famous repeat violator case is SMU football in 1987.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 2:11 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

Presumably being indicted by the federal government for alleged crimes committed in the course of your normal job duties is cause, though? Not that I doubt that Pitino would fight it and generally make a nuisance of himself, but it really seems like his case would be incredibly weak.

Yea, he's going to lose, but they're going to have to litigate it. Pitino is not actually named in anything, he's caught on the wire paying players, which isn't actually what the FBI seems to care about here, which was the other coaches steering those same players to specific financial advisers who would later fleece them. Pitino is implicated in comically corrupt NCAA violations, again, after one month prior agreeing to NCAA probation, but not actual crimes.

Also his case just got DRAMATICALLY weaker today with the report that Pitino himself is "Coach-2" in the indictment. As in, he was caught personally on the wire tap discussing the payments, after just telling the NCAA he had no idea about the hookers. And still tried to say he had no idea about this either, won't someone help me find the real killers!
posted by T.D. Strange at 2:52 PM on September 28, 2017

And for a look at how far ranging this scandal is for the city of Louisville, not just Pitino and the University: Yum! Center chairman says UofL basketball scandal presents ‘serious challenge’ to refinancing arena bonds
posted by T.D. Strange at 3:08 PM on September 28, 2017

Wow, the quotes from the Yum! Center chairman are unbelievable. I didn’t think I could hear flop sweat until now.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 7:13 PM on September 28, 2017

The corruption stems from what should be an above-board market being driven underground, so yes, paying market rate for athletes in an open market would in fact fix the issue.

Imbuing the market with magical powers doesn't stop being a libertarian fantasy just because you apply it to college sports. Even if you were a libertarian cheating scandals, rape, illegal practices, lies to recruits, finding ways to undo player benefits after an injury or a bad season--these don't go away because the star players can get paid now. Colleges have *more* incentive to exploit, not less, once kids are paid.

Also, I find it telling that for many of you, the "answer" to the NCAA devaluing the labor of predominantly minority and lower class athletes is to...devalue the labor of predominantly minority and lower class athletes, but while singing paeans to the "purity" of academia.

I'm not sure how you could see me singing paeans to academic purity in a one line post.

What I do know is the market doesn't "value" labor. The market values supply and demand. The market is perfectly willing to exploit upper middle class white kids in their 100 hours per week unpaid internships as they dream about the big time. Why do you think it's going to magically save the minority athletes you're trying to help?

You may be picturing a college full of kids being treated like the teenage Kobe Bryant was in the pros. I'm looking at in aggregate a nunch of people lower on the pecking order than minor league single A ballplayers with an average career of three or four years and a bogus "you also need to study" requirement thrown on top of their job responsibilities. I don't give a damn what paying them does to "academic purity." But I think it's obvious if you don't 100%cut out the incentives for colleges to exploit them--the prestige and TV and role as pro-league farm teams and the handful of profitable big-money programs--they're going to keep getting chewed up and spat out.
posted by mark k at 12:09 AM on September 29, 2017 [2 favorites]

Imbuing the market with magical powers doesn't stop being a libertarian fantasy just because you apply it to college sports. Even if you were a libertarian cheating scandals, rape, illegal practices, lies to recruits, finding ways to undo player benefits after an injury or a bad season--these don't go away because the star players can get paid now. Colleges have *more* incentive to exploit, not less, once kids are paid.

Here's the thing - what drives the exploitation of athletes in college is the fact that the NCAA puts all the cards in the hands of the colleges. The NCAA outright bans college athletes from retaining agents who would be able to analyze the offers from colleges (which, again, was a practice ruled to be illegal in a court of law as a restraint of the right to counsel.) Schools are allowed to give athletes one year scholarships, allowing coaches to drop players in favor of the hot new recruit, while being allowed to basically bind an athlete to the school if they're looking to transfer. The point of bringing things above board is to end all that, and force colleges to have to deal with players more fairly.

You keep on talking about "incentive" to exploit players, but just as important is their ability to do so. One of the big reasons that many "process" coaches that make the leap to the NFL fail is because an NFL head coach doesn't have the sort of absolute power over personnel that a college head coach does. And without that power, what winds up happening is their vaunted "process" breaks down, because it was ultimately their control and ability to exploit players at the heart of it. For another example, the decline of the dominance of the SEC tracks pretty well with the conference voting to constrain oversigning (that is, signing more players than one has scholarship slots, resulting in current players losing theirs through no fault of their own), resulting in the conference being less able to hoover up all the fresh talent and tossing their current players aside.

What these players need (and have been pushing for) is to get their fair share of the pie, and to be allowed deal more equitably with the schools. You say that you want to protect these athletes, but you aren't actually listening to what they want when you argue that the solution is to take the money out of the system. Moreover, doing so would harm many of them by completely devaluing their labor even moreso than the NCAA is doing, removing the rationale for colleges to even offer these scholarships in the first place.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:44 AM on September 29, 2017

I recommend reading Charles Pierce's latest piece for Sports Illustrated, where he explains why this prosecution only serves the interests of the NCAA:

On the surface, the charges seem flatly bizarre. Who was defrauded? Generally, it seems that the players got what they were promised, and so did the coaches, and so did the agents. (If you say the NCAA was the injured party, or the universities, go stand in the corner of Indianapolis until we say you can leave.) Even bribery seems like something of a stretch—especially if we assume, as we must, that almost every shoe company and every university doing business in the collegiate sports-industrial complex does business in pretty much the same way. How is what Adidas is alleged to have done bribery, and not simply very sharp and competitive negotiating? And why is the federal government spending money to chase this particular rabbit down this particular hole in the first place? Nothing good will come of this. The underground economy of college sports will adapt the way it always does. And the aboveground economy will remain the province of the unindicted sharpers who did such a great job with it in 2008.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:37 AM on September 29, 2017

The administration at Penn State looked the other way for years in the Sandusky case. There was clear lack of institutional control - children were molested by a predator who groomed them using university facilities - but of course Penn State was never going to get the death penalty, and the sanctions that were imposed were lifted early. I can't even talk about it without getting very loud and shouty. The NCAA will slap Louisville on the wrist, there will be scholarship restrictions and maybe a ban on postseason play, but I'll be genuinely stunned if they get hit with the kiss of death. There's too much money on the line for that.

I'm an LSU alum and football fan. The team may be a hot mess this season, but I'm terrified by the almost certain corruption going on there, just like at Alabama and every other powerhouse school. I've seen with own eyes a star athlete who grew up in poverty pull up to a store in a new sports car, try to pay for a case of beer with a roll of twenties, and get waved off (yeah, he was underage). I kind of felt "Good for him" at the time. The football coach gets $4 million/year plus a car and endorsements, the bookstore sells replica jerseys with the player's name on it for $120, but the players doing the actual work can't take a dime from anyone without risking their scholarship and eligibility? Bull. I don't know if paying the players openly and honestly will really solve any problems, but it can't be worse than the current system.
posted by wintermind at 8:37 PM on September 29, 2017 [1 favorite]

Pitino did end up getting fired, but, zagging where others might have zigged, he sued Adidas instead of the university, claiming this was all a conspiracy on the part of a shoe company to funnel money to his recruits and, I guess, to make him look bad? If that was really their goal, I might have suggested publicizing that their deal with the Louisville athletic department was divided such that $1.5 million went directly to Pitino and $25,000 went to the program itself.
posted by Copronymus at 2:35 PM on October 17, 2017