Wait, will the Feds go after Baylor?

Good Aggie Hunting said:

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Soooo....

https://www.reddit.com/r/CollegeBasketball/comments/72u1wi/is_texas_ams_2015_recruiting_class_suspicious/

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I've heard we don't have to worry - hope that's correct.

Article that has a transcript of taped phone call where Adidas guy is negotiating the matching of 150K deal to get 2018 5-star recruit to commit to Miami instead of Arizona.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.azdesertswarm.com/platform/amp/basketball/2017/9/27/16376992/arizona-wildcats-basketball-allegedly-offered-recruit-150000-fbi-documents-charges-book-richardson

basic8 said:

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bobinator said:

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"AAU" in and of itself isn't a problem. AAU is actually really bad at branding apparently, because that's another false target like the NCAA.

This situation arose in basketball because pro basketball players are worth A LOT of money, a lot of kids who want to play pro basketball don't have any money, and it's relatively cheap for someone with a lot of money to fund them.

And you've set up a system where there is no free market. You can't just simply pay the best players for being the best players until they're 19-20 years old.

So you have a false market, with a lot of money in it, and that money is going to go somewhere. So it's going toward influencing the players. It's going to people around them, their coaches, their "handlers," or whoever who, in a lot of cases, don't have any money themselves. How can they refuse it?

But again, getting the best players together in the summer to play against each other isn't in and of itself a problem.

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Technically, I think AAU is Amateur Athletic Union, a real organization. summer Basketball that is in these cross hairs is not AAU sponsored. Just was always called "AAU ball", and still is in conversation, etc.

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Correct. AAU historically is a well-respect sports organization for swimming, basketball, wrestling, track & field.

The term is used loosely today about a group of coaches with ties to unscrupulous NBA agents.

Football board says FBI mobile command is in CS

Then delete post and ban op. No need to tip them off

Bunk Moreland said:

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mazzag[img said:

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[/img]

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"and the FBI is... Moving on!"

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LOL that T-Shirt.

It is difficult to feel much sympathy specifically for Louisville when they were already on probation for the strippers in the dorms thing, and let Pitino keep his job despite that.

A group of FBI agents ate lunch in College Station today

davidhouse said:

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A group of FBI agents ate lunch in College Station today

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Let's hope they didn't catch Stansbury doing things while he was here.

davidhouse said:

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A group of FBI agents ate lunch in College Station today

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Cane's or Layne's?

The players and their parents who accepted the money are just as culpable. These people know accepting money in this fashion is illegal and against NCAA reg's.

The IRS will jump in and collect taxes off the money.

Where did the Adidas guy get 100,000.00 to spread around? Petty cash box in the office? Has anybody asked that question yet?

CactusThomas said:

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haha That was a scare for a sec.

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Creating false invoices for Adidas to pay

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Early in my career I worked in accounting in a big company. I can't see how anyone could have done this way back then (early '90s), much less now. Even if technically you could get a check or cash withdrawal, it would create budget issues and a junior auditor would catch it in a heartbeat. A department I was in later had a hell of a time getting corporate to pay (out of our budget) consulting fees that were low 4 figures.

I guess I'm just not sinister enough to figure these things out.

I'm pretty sure A&M will be implicated for Stansbury. Pretty much any school with an AAU recruit or another will eventually be. A&M, Texas, Baylor are the big Texas schools. It will be interesting to see how far they go in their investigation

I'd expect to see quite a few power teams like Kentucky, Duke, NC all involved. Any school with AAU connections (which is all of them), etc ... Maybe a year without the tournament while things are sorted out. Pretty much all of P5 would be complicit here

Basketball has been corrupt for a long time. It will be interesting to see the repercussions

I think the immediate question is: do the staffs at the named schools (well, unnamed in the report, but anyone can figure it out), suspend their entire staffs? Auburn, Arizona, S.Car, Miami, Louisville (probably happened), OkSt., and USC. I guess we'll known by the weekend.

I don't think the Seargent Schultz defense is going to work for the head coaches.

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Survive and advance

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There are a LOT of coaches and administrators that are up right now that will settle for surviving.

91AggieLawyer said:

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That's how t.u. used to keep ahead of the NCAA. They hired Butch Worley, NCAA enforcement director, in 1987. That was right around the time SMU got clobbered and also around the time t.u. was having NCAA problems of their own involving Butch Hadnot et.al. Somehow that major infraction brought 2 years of probation (that got reduced to 1) and no TV or bowl bans, or scholarship reductions. We got all 3 a few years later with a totally fabricated "lack of institutional control."

I'm still pissed off about how all that went down.

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That reminds me of how UNC snitched on/framed Valvano and NC State, Then ACC commish John Swofford (former UNC AD) later piled on Miami and Florida State. FSU was assigned sanctions beyond the NCAA...and later the Miami case blew up in everyone's faces.

Also, keep in mind ESPN President John Skipper is another a UNC grad, so ESiPN has dampened the press coverage on their network...and of course piled on the Duke Lacrosse case, which generated false charges by DA Mike Nifong (yes, another UNC grad!)...who was later disbarred.


So...yeah a tag team of t.u. proportions to stay in power. UNC and t.u. can do no wrong...and if they do cover it up!

Although the Robinson situation was a cluster **** I can't find any evidence he's under investigation. We'll see. FWIW, bribery charges are very hard to prove...ergo taped surveillance.

AJ Sr safe for now?

https://sports.yahoo.com/alabama-caught-fbi-probe-001659682.html

monarch said:

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The players and their parents who accepted the money are just as culpable. These people know accepting money in this fashion is illegal and against NCAA reg's.

The IRS will jump in and collect taxes off the money.

Where did the Adidas guy get 100,000.00 to spread around? Petty cash box in the office? Has anybody asked that question yet?

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This is small dollars for Adidas, but this too will be interesting to see how they follow through with their own "institutional control" aspect. My guess is, if they drop the hammer on the Adidas exec, he knows enough particulars and individuals involved to implicate Nike and UA in pretty much the same batch of schemes.

For the shoe company top execs, it probably just looked like any other marketing expense and got swept under the rug in the details, "did we pay James Harden $105.8 or 108.5 million, I dunno, whichever, close enough, looks like the difference is in the college stuff anyway, works for me..."

I still see very few victims in all of this, apart from the people who believed they were playing under a common set of rules and were thus defrauded. I don't want to be too cynical, but I have a hard time believing that anyone actually thought that the big money didn't buy players.

Two days in and we're up to 8 schools directly implicated already. How long until it's 80?

bobinator said:

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I still haven't seen anything that's convincing me that this is changing anything long term.

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Agreed. College basketball programs generate so much money to help fund other programs and entire athletic departments. Take UK for instance, if the "hammer" ever came down on UK, it might potentially disrupt the economy for the entire state. Thats an extreme example, but the point still stands. There won't be widespread changes or programs getting a "death penalty". NCAA basketball will move on, with maybe a few more restrictions/guidelines, but nothing more in the grand scheme of things.

I do think this is highlighting a potential breaking point for the grassroots basketball system and within the next ten-fifteen years they're either going to have to start letting college players make money or we'll have a basketball minor league system that's more like baseball where most of the elite high schoolers go directly into that system instead of having to play college ball.

But that was already the case, this is just probably bringing more attention to it.

bobinator said:

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I still haven't seen anything that's convincing me that this is changing anything long term.

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It is better than doing nothing. Ultimately I do think you have to make radical reforms like get away with the 'one and done' system and let the people who don't give a flip about school just go pro out of high school. Otherwise, you go to college for 3 years minimum.

I had assumed as a fan that players were getting paid and that the shoe companies had a lot of influence on which schools got the best players, but reading the detailed FBI transcripts of the phone calls and meetings has been eye opening. Reading the details has really hammered home how rigged and crooked the system is.

And as bad as things have gotten, the system has seemingly been getting worse and worse, such as now the trend of these high school juniors able to reclassify with ease and skip their high school senior year no problem. How do I know for sure that no people were paid off at HS and NCAA compliance offices by shoe company money so that a HS junior Bagley could get over to Duke this season? I don't.

That is what happens when you let a corrupt system go unchecked. It will just keep getting worse and worse feeding on itself.

Not sure I'll be able to watch this upcoming college basketball season in quite the same way I have before. If the FBI is at least able to turn the light on for a moment and in particular nail some of the major players in this cesspool like that executive at Adidas then great. If this can end up being the beginning of the end of the one-and-done model then great.