A pizza!
FBI College Basketball Corruption Investigation
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A pizza!
Great gif if anyone can see it on twitter of Pitino's press confrence...
https://twitter.com/DatDudeNickyP/status/912685066073014272
https://twitter.com/DatDudeNickyP/status/912685066073014272
A Kentucky tv station just tweeted that a big announcement is expected this morning regarding Rick Pitino.
My guess is he's gone.
Illiini
- In the land of the Nittany Lion
This is not only a legal matter, it's also p.r., and it's good to get out ahead of it. What the athletic department has done is get out ahead of the matter. Every major college athletic department in the country is going to have its phone ringing off the hook from reporters wanting to get The Scoop, or at least post the story on line first.
Google News rewards the early worm with higher listings. You want to be on that coveted first page of news, especially if you're one to Break The Story. In this case, the rush will be to post the statement the athletic department made
And that's news that Illini fans want to hear.
Plus from a practical standpoint, the athletic department can direct all questions to the Official Statement, and then all the media can report is that, well, the verbiage in the statement, and anything else they might say about Illinois, absent evidence of wrongdoing, is speculation and looks like it.
Now the decision to team up with Nike--despite the dumb shield etc--is looking pretty good...unless Nike was doing the same thing. I'd like to think that there are people who decided that they "weren't going there," even if was only to avoid the eventual blowup once they were caught.
(One would hope that people still have integrity and that's why they didn't get involved...although you might wonder if one coach or another was approached by the Nike rep and then ratted him out to the FBI, and from there the Feds were able to start pulling on individual strings and watch everything unravel).
pruman91
- Paducah, Ky
http://www.stltoday.com/sports/coll...cle_37411528-6067-5150-914c-5a6590ed8f9a.html
NCAA President Mark Emmert condemned the alleged misconduct, saying in a statement, “Coaches hold a unique position of trust with student-athletes and their families, and these bribery allegations, if true, suggest an extraordinary and despicable breach of that trust.”
if true ?....lol
The investigation began after Martin Blazer, a Pittsburgh-based financial adviser to pro athletes, began cooperating with authorities in 2014. Blazer, accused by Securities and Exchange Commission of taking money from clients without permission, pleaded guilty this month to fraud and other crimes.
He admitted making payments and loans to NCAA athletes as far back as 2000 to get them to hire him.
heads will roll !!!!!
NCAA President Mark Emmert condemned the alleged misconduct, saying in a statement, “Coaches hold a unique position of trust with student-athletes and their families, and these bribery allegations, if true, suggest an extraordinary and despicable breach of that trust.”
if true ?....lol
The investigation began after Martin Blazer, a Pittsburgh-based financial adviser to pro athletes, began cooperating with authorities in 2014. Blazer, accused by Securities and Exchange Commission of taking money from clients without permission, pleaded guilty this month to fraud and other crimes.
He admitted making payments and loans to NCAA athletes as far back as 2000 to get them to hire him.
heads will roll !!!!!
Contract extension.
New shoe line
Or turns out that he himself is in fact an FBI agent working deep undercover for the last 40 years to infiltrate and ultimately bring down the organized criminal underworld of college bball recruiting. This would actually explain a lot come to think of it..
It takes very little time and effort to research the fact that out of the 4 assistant coaches charged, 3 of them were at Nike schools (Lamont Evans/Ok. State, Emanuel Richardson/Arizona, and Tony Bland/USC) and one at an Under Armour school (Chuck Person/Auburn). If people think this is just an Adidas school thing, involving Adidas coaches and schools, think again.
Yeah, I saw an earlier post saying this is good for college bball, and I thought that person was frickin crazy. This is an isolated incident. There is no clean-up of college athletics today, nor will there be. This particular investigation may grow outwards, but there probably won't be any new ones.
The reason there has been cheating, is that the NCAA is making tons and tons of money, and many of the truly elite recruits want their share. This would be easy enough if agents were allowed to work with athletes, but the NCAA hasn't allowed that. Coaches become middlemen to keep the NCAA out, which is illegal because now coaches are taking money as government officials.
But guess what? The big money is still there, and the need for talent is still very much there. Cheaters will work around this --they'll just be more careful.
https://www.sbnation.com/college-ba...tball-fbi-investigation-coaches-agents-adidas
This is a rundown of all the names to know in the investigation. BU's name is dropped. It's only to establish Evans's position at OSU. But still this shows how we could get drug through the mud a little bit just by association.
This is a rundown of all the names to know in the investigation. BU's name is dropped. It's only to establish Evans's position at OSU. But still this shows how we could get drug through the mud a little bit just by association.
Research isn't even necessary. It's right out there:
"the anonymous basketball coach helped Adidas orchestrate the deal just so UM wouldn't lose the recruit to another anonymous university, which had also offered the player $150,000 through a rival athletic company."
University of Miami Basketball Program Linked to FBI Corruption Probe
More likely a mob boss! Not exactly a good disguise!!
Attachments
I'm an attorney, too, but you don't have to be an attorney to find and read the criminal complaint against Lamont Evans. You do have to read between the lines a bit, though, because most of the actors in this drama are unnamed.
As I read it, Lamont Evans received $2,500 (one installment of $500, followed by $2,000 later) in exchange for introducing Jawun Evans to a "financial adviser". This took place in West Virginia while OSU was there to play (and defeat) WVU.
This did not happen in the year prior to BU's arrival at OSU. Brad Underwood was the OSU coach when all of this happened.
It is alleged that Lamont Evans did the same sort of thing while an assistant at S Carolina. He got about $20K for "introductions" during that time. BU has zero connection to those payments.
BU's link to any of this is tenuous in the extreme. It amounts to "guilt by association" and nothing more. But the link does exist.
I think the Illinois statement is the right thing here. They are "monitoring" the situation. What else can they do?
This is my take...
FBI has limited resources to go after this issue. Their focus IMHO is to nail the adults in the room such as the corporations and money managers. The asst. coaches are the link and will be punished as well. The parents and kids seem to the small potatoes, an issue the NCAA will address.
This will scare other programs and shoe companies who are engaged in this behavior. I think there are more programs and coaches who will get caught up in this. I don't think being from the same coaching tree (Frank Martin) and hiring the assistant coach for 9 months is going to be an issue.
I think the blue bloods and fringe programs should be concerned. Illinois has not been on the fringe, we lost out on a ton of recruits because we would not play the game.
FBI has limited resources to go after this issue. Their focus IMHO is to nail the adults in the room such as the corporations and money managers. The asst. coaches are the link and will be punished as well. The parents and kids seem to the small potatoes, an issue the NCAA will address.
This will scare other programs and shoe companies who are engaged in this behavior. I think there are more programs and coaches who will get caught up in this. I don't think being from the same coaching tree (Frank Martin) and hiring the assistant coach for 9 months is going to be an issue.
I think the blue bloods and fringe programs should be concerned. Illinois has not been on the fringe, we lost out on a ton of recruits because we would not play the game.
I agree with your statement. I think the NCAA better have more than their bylaws to go after BU. If they go after BU they better go after a lot more people first and universities.
I have managed people the last 6-7 years, I provide training and re-enforce the rules. Those people who want to live in the gray or break the rules/law will do it. The only way you find out is when they get caught. All you can do is set the culture, provide supervision/training and discipline employees. So I see no benefit to BU in what Evans is alleged to have done and the incoming recruits at OKST seem pretty average to below average for a power6 school(no top 100s).
Deleted member 19448
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Seems a day like this was inevitable (eventually) from the day schools first started signing "exclusive" deals with shoe/apparel companies. IIRC the practice started sometime in the mid 90's. It brought outside influence into the whole thing aside from just the school boosters that used to be the primary 3rd party with a vested interest in the programs. This brought in corporations where dropping bags of 6 figures of cash would not even be worthy of blinking an eye in their annual budgets & they have interest in securing the next Jordan or Lebron that could be worth billions to their company.
Say nothing, as schools that had not been directly involved did. They did not issue an official statement. Issuing a statement actually shows the need to defend yourself to the public. And IMO, if they felt that they needed to, the correct language would have been to vehemently deny that any member of the University was ever involved, without adding "monitoring" as part of the wording. Monitoring implies that the situation (wrt UI) could change.
Deleted member 10676
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Again -- and again-- the NCAA has nothing to do with this investigation. They heard about it when the public heard about it. This is the FBI and they will go after who they want to go after and not certain people first.
They will for sure be asking about BU -- he has long ties with Evans and hired him once and tried to hire him a second time. If he knew about what Evans was doing or if in some way that's what he hired him for, Evans will spill that to get out from under up to 80 years of prison time.
This isn't about us doing logic as to why BU did or did not benefit from what Evans did, it's more than likely what BU knew about Evans under his watch.
One report I read said scores of coaches are going to go down before this is over. We can only hope Underwood isn't one of them, but all the hoping in the world isn't going to matter to the FBI, or the fact that we've sucked so long we deserve a break or anything else. Like Obelix said last night, this is not a namby pamby NCAA investigation.
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