Is anyone safe in this?
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@HighEliteMajor Great article.
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“Is anyone safe in this?” –@jayballer54
No, because those at the top will sacrifice everyone below them to keep the gravy train flowing.
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You know Code and Gatto who both worked for Nike just a few years and their gonna scream about doing it there as well. I personally think everyone pays players, but the FBI doesn’t care if a booster gives kid some cash, they only care when cooperate America is involved.
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No program is safe because every program employs someone that would take a bribe. Every program has a grad assistant, a video analyst, a recruiting coordinator, etc. Those jobs pay crap. Like less than $20,000 in some cases for grad assistants and video analysts at many programs, less than $30,000 for a lot of recruiting coordinators.
If you’re making $20,000 a year or less, five grand for a player is a major windfall, but that’s no kind of money in the concept of a scheme like this. But five grand to make sure the head coach sees this player’s new highlight video first every week is easy. Bill Self, Roy Williams, Coach K, Cal, etc., can’t be bought for five grand. But there’s someone on that staff that can be. All the ShoeCo has to do is find them.
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@justanotherfan yah, you know what, youre GD right. But, maybe I’m being biased or naïve but I would hope that KU basketball staff has better morals than that. All those guys. From Coach Self down to the video and towels guy.
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They haven’t implicated anyone that low level yet.
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@justanotherfan But would anyone that low on the food chain actually have any influence?
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Also what HEM said. A lot of KU guys have signed with Adidas, but some Nike and UA too. I’m not overly worried about that aspect.
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Of course every program has someone susceptible to this, especially with the big $$ involved. Remember this? http://www.espn.com/college-sports/news/story?id=5821082
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I would suspect the people down in the food chain are not involved. Any player that would command any type of expenditure is one the staff is already following anyway and shoecos do not need to bribe someone to present said player to the coaching staff. As I underrated, the staff meets at the beginning of the week and the activities for the week outlined and the lower level personnel works on the details but “policy” is dictated by the coaching staff alone with the HC having the final word.
Likewise, HC are likely not at the receiving end of compensation and their involvement is more like the one Pitino is alleged to be involved. i.e. giving tacit direction or permission to “approach” a prospect and “steer” him to the program.
I would suspect the bulk of money changing hands involves lower paid assistant coaches, particularly those with prior ties via AAU. KU assistants appear to be well compensated and with potential head coaching futures so their involvement is less likely.
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@JayHawkFanToo I agree. It still worries me. In these sort of things, ignorance is perceived as lack of program control. The buck stops at the top whether fairly or unfairly. And folks making very good livings still want more. Personally, my biggest worry is that a jacka** prosecutor looking to make headlines targets the perceived pristine coach. Self is really that guy (along with coach K). Ugh.
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The people down the food chain don’t make the decisions, but they can influence the decision maker.
I remember one of my first big meetings as a professional fresh out of school, I was being introduced to people and someone introduced me to the secretary of a company. She was the secretary for the president and basically, if you wanted to talk to the president, you had to talk to her. She was the gatekeeper. There was no getting around her. If you approached the president in person, he would tell you to call her. If you called him on his cell, he would tell you to call her.
If she didn’t like you, you had zero access to the president. If she did, you had unlimited access. She was lower on the totem pole, but she could make very powerful people jump through whatever hoops she wanted because she controlled access.
So say you’re a ShoeCo and you want to get a recruit to KU. Bill Self doesn’t review every single highlight video himself. He doesn’t have the time to do that. So the video coordinator or the recruiting coordinator do that and they put together the initial reports. Obviously, that’s not going to turn a no talent guy into a KU recruit, but if you’re trying to solve the difference between say, Devon Dotson and Ayo Dosunmu (ranked 26th and 29th overall, and as the 6th and 7th best PG in the country), what those initial internal reports about a guy say could make a difference in who the school is pursuing early in the process. If you’re ShoeCo that needs Devon Dotson to rise up the ranks, handing the video guys at Big School X and State U a few grand to make sure those highlights are presented to the coaches so that Big School X shows interest and State U sends a coach to watch them play.
Now of course, I’m on the outside, so I don’t know what happened with one guy or another. But the possibility was (and still is) there.
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@justanotherfan I buy in to this more if anyone lower than an assistant coach had been in the indictment.
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@BShark yet
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You are comparing apples and oranges. Prospects do not go and see coaches, other than the official and unofficial visit and long afte the school has been in contact and shown interest; coaches go to see prospects and the gate keepers are not the secretaries or the video coordinators but the HS/AAU coaches and the prospects families/posses.
Coaches have a prioritized list of prospects and it really does not make a difference which video they see first, they will request and watch the videos of the prospects they are following. Outside sources send videos, not to the video coordinators but to the coaching staff and I could see where an assistant could have influence but not a video coordinator.
KU uses very expensive and sophisticated external recruiting evaluating services that provide detailed reports, more so than the internal staff.
Again, apples and oranges, in my opinion of course.
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@HighEliteMajor There is no way that Kentucky and Dook recruit like they do without the shoe companies. Noone in either program knows how much anyone has received except for that individual athlete. Plausible deniability. Has it happened with us? Not with JJ. With Wigs, I assume nothing out of the ordinary happened. He did sign with Adidas, but that doesn’t mean he is guilty. Although his original signing with us was a shock. I’ll bet Coach and the staff wouldn’t know. To say they would be held “accountable” for a 3rd party transaction they didn’t initiate, have control over, or have any of the particulars might be a stretch. Maybe in that touchy feeley world of institutional control universe it might, but I’m betting unless the big name coaches pull a Pitino, and mention the $$$, it would be a “lessons learned” situation. It wouldn’t surprise me if Kentucky’s annual payroll was over 3 million a year. Paid by Nike.
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@KUSTEVE You are assuming coach Cal doesn’t know if Nike paid a player on the assumption that they’d have a ring of plausible deniability? Ok, perhaps not a bad assumption on the detail. You said, “Has it happened with us? Not with JJ. With Wigs, I assume nothing out of the ordinary happened.” Why would you think JJ didn’t get cash? Again, huge assumption.
Now, logically – I see your assumptions on a HC’s knowledge. But setting up a ring of plausible deniability would require the man at the center, possibly, to know that there are violations occurring that he just doesn’t want to know about it. Surely a guy in Self’s position knows the game. And that is how a prosecutor gets to his prey. Knowing the macro vs. the micro might be the enough. Now, can they ultimately prove a criminal charge with the plausible deniability in place? Maybe not – it’s how the mafia bosses escape prosecution. Maybe an assistant wears a wire? Who knows. But prosecutors have lost trying, and the simple filing of charge is enough to throw everything into chaos.
Double ugh.
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4:50 p.m.
The University of Kansas is conducting an internal review of its storied program after a nationwide federal bribery investigation uncovered rampant fraud and corruption in college basketball.
Associated athletic director Jim Marchiony tells The Associated Press that the Adidas-sponsored school has not been contacted by any law enforcement agencies, but it chose to review its program after the Department of Justice filed charges Tuesday against 10 people, including four college basketball coaches.
One of the central figures in the probe is James Gatto, the director of global sports marketing for Adidas, who is accused of funneling $100,000 to a prospect to attend Louisville.
Marchiony said nobody implicated in the investigation was part of negotiating a 12-year extension with Adidas announced just last week to sponsor Kansas athletics. The new contract, spanning 14 years and providing $191 million, is the fourth-largest shoe and apparel deal in the NCAA.
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Investigation started Friday. Since nothing has come of it yet I am hopeful.
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Everybody uses external sources to get the names of the top 100 or so players. But once you have those guys and use the scouting services to sort them into tiers, you start the internal evaluation process. That internal process starts with the recruiting coordinator and video coordinator pulling info on the guys they are thinking of pursuing (perhaps 40 or so in basketball).
I never said a player would contact a school. I said the ShoeCo would. Remember, these players have been going to camps since they were 12 or 13, if not younger. If there’s a preference that’s been established that such and such player is an adidas guy, or a Nike guy, or a Jordan guy, that’s known within the circuit.
So you can work both ends of it. Promote a guy to the school, and also promote the school to a certain player.
Right now, in the Class of 2018, KU has two commits and is still pursuing 19 other guys. KU offered 30 players, which means they probably evaluated twice that number. Who do you think is sorting through those 70 guys? That’s not an external source and the coaches and assistants aren’t doing that while they are coaching. That’s up to some of the lower level guys, particularly on lower ranked players. Everyone knows about Zion Williamson. Not everyone is on Jarius Hamilton. Fewer can separate Hamilton from Gabe Brown.
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@justanotherfan But video guys won’t last very long if their evaluations are unreliable due to being skewed. Imagine if a coach has to waste time looking at 3 guys “sponsored” by a single company, none of whom are considered by other schools to be special, and meanwhile misses out on available players who everyone thinks are better. Sayonara, baby! I think the return on investment here makes it unlikely that amounts paid to these types of guys would be more than the equivalent of “tips.”
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True, but I’m not talking about promoting a scrub. I’m talking about creating a preference for Guy A over Guy B. Let’s take Devon Dotson and Ayo Dosunmu, who I mentioned earlier. They are both good players. Both ranked pretty high. Both clearly behind the top guys in the class (Quickley, Grimes, etc.).
Let’s say now that ShoeCo decides they want Dotson at KU. You have to make sure that the staff has a preference for Dotson over Dosunmu, because there’s little chance that both go to the same school. Now as an evaluator, someone says make sure you highlight Dotson over Dosunmu in your evaluations. Obviously, that’s not going to keep KU from evaluating both, but if the video guy is higher on Dotson, the staff is going to probably be higher on him as well. The internal preference will be for Dotson over Dosunmu. Dosunmu will start exploring other options because the “buzz” has KU high on Dotson. The coordinator is at very little risk here because both are good players. Dotson is going to go somewhere and play high level D1 ball. So is Dosunmu. So there’s almost no risk of getting canned because ultimately the coordinator helped identify a lower ranked talent to bring to KU. Dotson comes in and plays for 3-4 years, does well, nobody remembers where Dosunmu goes on this site unless he goes to somewhere in conference or Mizzou. He has a good career at Illinois, UConn or Memphis and nobody bats an eyelash.
But that’s the difference. ShoeCo picks a guy they want at a prominent program like KU over a lesser national program like Oklahoma State or Illinois. They aren’t going to pick bad players because they don’t want scrubs being known as “adidas guys” or “Nike guys” or whatever. But when separating two closely ranked players, influencing a small preference could go a long way.
I base a lot of this theory on how some all star teams are/have been selected. A bit of small internal preference changes who gets picked for their HS all conference or all star team vs. who gets snubbed.
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Remember that the Feds got Al Capone for tax evasion and not for the numerous other crimes he committed but could not prove. Some of the convictions in this particular scenario might well come down to tax evasion, as funny and ironic as it seems.
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I just don’t see it. Shoecos are not paying program staffs, they are paying prospects. Their interest is primarily in the top 30 or so players and nothing below that since the chance of the becoming superstars is slim and they get more benefit paying the prospects directly and schools would be happy to have these players; I imagine some even pay for the privilege.
Assistant coaches are paid by agents (not shoecos) to steer players already in the program to them. I just don’t see where the money for video coordinators would come from or why anyone would want or need to do it.
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This is what I wanted to hear… even though we may not even be close to the stink, we are still looking within. And if anything is found, feel sure WE will expose it and not cover it up!
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The money is everywhere. ShoeCos are paying prospects. ShoeCos are paying agents (both on top of the table and otherwise). ShoeCos are paying schools (they even brag about the size of those contracts). ShoeCos are paying college coaches (both on top of the table and otherwise). ShoeCos are paying AAU coaches (some on top of the table, some underneath).
Agents are paying prospects (under the table). Agents are paying AAU coaches (under the table). Agents are paying college coaches (very hush hush, but it does happen). Agents are working with ShoeCos (wink wink, nod nod).
This is a multi billion dollar industry. ShoeCos have influence. That influence has to go from the top down. They can give the head coaches a nice bonus in the contracts legally. They can throw in some money for the assistants within the contract as well (legally). They can pay AAU coaches legally.
Agents have influence. They can work with ShoeCos (and do all the time). They can work with coaches (who do you think is advising coaches on the draft status of players?).
I don’t know if you have ever known any high level basketball (or football) recruits personally, but there’s a seedy side to even the nicest, neatest recruitment, and it starts before they even get to high school. I can personally tell you about offers made to friends of mine (better athletes than me, obviously) to attend certain high schools as far back as the mid 90s. I can tell you about offers made recently to get kids to attend certain high schools, play with certain AAU teams, etc. These aren’t agents. These are ShoeCos that sponsor local high schools that want to make sure those schools are winning at the HS level. Obviously, I am not going to name names here, but there are schools in the eastern part of this state and throughout the Kansas City area that recruit like colleges - not just private schools, either.
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How would you like to be an insurance salesman and receive a call from Jim Gatto looking to buy a $10 million life insurance policy?
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We are talking about illegal/unsanctioned/under the table payoffs so HC coaches individual contracts with shoecos are not a part of the equation since they are known to, stated in their contracts and in some cases subject to approval by their programs.
As you said, the hush hush money from shoecos and other parties such as boosters is going to the prospects and their handlers and money from agents to program personnel in a position to influence and steer players to an agent. Again, I just don’t see where employees like video coordinators get involved. Not a big deal.
BTW, I do know several professional and college athletes in various sports including basketball, football, tennis, soccer and yes…lacrosse which surprisingly has a professional league, that have gone through the process. One of the biggest names in soccer is a family friend, a highly recruited HS lineman ended up going to MU and was drafted and then decided to get an MBA and leave football behind like other players are starting to do now and he gave me a lot of inside information on the recruiting process and what goes inside major college programs, the brother of a good friend of mine was a highly ranked foreign basketball recruit who ended up at Villanova a few years ago and one of my nephews is currently looking to becoming a professional athlete, so yes, you could say I am somewhat familiar with what goes on. I am sure everyone in this forum probably knows someone that has gone through the process, so nothing new there.
We can argue ad infinitum on this subject and not reach a consensus. Let’s just agree to disagree and move on…we can agree it is getting boring and other posters will probably thank us…
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Valid points made. Agree to disagree with much respect.
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I watched blue chips today “It ain’t about education, it ain’t much about winnin, hell it ain’t even about basketball. It’s about money, just GD money” seems more truthful than ever.
