Federal documents detail sweeping potential NCAA violations involving high-profile players, schools

Always thought Self had a guilty look on his face.

 

I don't think he's as bad as others I give him full credit for suspending Preston this year. But if you check the archives you'll note I was complaining on ASFN when Preston was still playing in Redondo Beach that I couldnt' understand why UCLA was recruiting him given how unlikely it was he'd ever qualify. His academics were terrible, his mom was a known headcase(not Lavar Ball bad but very outspoken) and it simply made no sense for UCLA to recruit him. I was thrilled when they finally dropped him. I was very surprised Kansas took his commitment I didn't expect him to ever play college ball and he didn't.

But at least when Self saw enough to believe somethign was wrong, he suspended him.

I just don't believe you can have a shoe company steering kids to ANY program and the head coach isn't somewhat aware of it. That's what this whole thing the FBI story should be about IMO. The idea that schools are victims I can somewhat agree with, but the coaches are not, the coaches know, the coaches are benefitting from the system. The system is set up to give the coaches plausible deniability, that's what made it so unusual when Book, Bland and the rest were caught directly involved in the money trail.

 

Not sure Self had any other options. With the cloud of the investigation hovering over NCAA basketball, it would've been stupid to justify Preston being on the team given all of the physical evidence and pretty much asking for unwanted attention. That, or KU knew its business was being investigated.

You've asserted that the head coaches should/will be held responsible because the NCAA's statute about HCs maintaining a clean program irrespective of situations that may happen behind their backs, so if that's true, there will be punishments against all HCs implicated.

 

Well of course he had a choice, Sean Miller played ALkins, now he didn't get caught driving in a car he couldn't explain like Preston did but there's as much smoke about Alkins as there was about preston. Self could have played Preston and didn't, I give him credit for that like I do Enfield suspending a key player for the whole year.

I think head coaches are control freaks so I seriously doubt Self didn't know somethign about this and yes there is an NCAA rule that says a HC can be held accountable for actions of his assistants but in this case, nobody has alleged the KU assistants were involved. Nobody is saying Townsend et al were dealing with agents like Dawkins. In the Arizona case they were, Book is under indictment and Pasternack has come up in the original story and the Yahoo story.

So the 2 are different, the NCAA rule says HC is accountable for the actions of his assistants, that applies to Arizona and USC, but at least at the moment wouldn't apply to Kansas.

So if what we know now is all there is, I would expect that Miller and Enfield would be treated more harshly than Self because their assistants were directly involved, his weren't.

Now what we know may change. and as I keep saying it won't surprise me at all if Adidas steered kids to UCLA and if they did, I would not believe for a second that Alford didn't know. Head coaches know what's going on, and if they don't, they should.

 

Let me just point out that in order for Russ to be right that Self knew about these payments from Adidas, he would have planned to play Preston this season even though he was ineligible until a single car accident happened that KU self investigated and voluntarily reported to the NCAA while cautiously sitting Preston out the whole time.

Once Preston declared himself professional, Self then chose to play another ineligible kid who was able to come in because Preston declared and play him in meaningful games.

The juxtaposition of caution and brazen one would have to have is not logical or rational. Russ starts with a biased conclusion and works backwards. It doesn't add up.

The report also states that (supposedly) DeSousa was committed to Maryland because Under Armour paid his guardian to do so, but DeSousa wanted to come to KU and the guardian had Adidas pay off the payment from Under Armour in order to make this happen. While there is obvious problems with Adidas doing this, it in no way signals that KU/Adidas has to purchase DeSousa's desire to come play basketball at KU. In fact the payment was only to get out of a previous "contract". This is per the report.

Nobody in the media is talking about UA or Maryland from this report because why?

 

Worth a read if you care about this subject. Some highlights:

Q: Do you see it as a possibility that Bill Self could not have known about the shoe companies trying to steer them (the two players cited in indictment against Adidas reps) to KU?

JAY BILAS: Well first I don’t know that that (steering players) happened, but if you assume that it did, I can absolutely believe that coaches were not involved in those type of things. At Miami it’s the same type of deal. Heck the government has already dropped one guy out that claimed to be passing money onto a kid that kept the money for himself. So who knows what is being said. You don’t know. I think like anything else, it needs to be proven. … To my understanding there is no allegation that anyone at Kansas had any knowledge.

[...]

Q: (following up on previous question)

JAY BILAS: … I read (one) article the other day, the one that was using unnamed sources on people like balking at Kansas using the term ‘victim.’ That’s not Kansas’ term. That’s what the government claims. That’s what the the government says. They (KU officials) didn’t pull that out of thin air. The United States government says they are a victim, That is their theory. I don’t understand why people won’t go on the record. What’s so horrible about it? If you’ve got the opinion that Kansas, they’re not victims, then why wouldn’t you stand behind that? I didn’t understand that one. To me that’s like an issue of petty jealousy. It’s like claiming UCLA wouldn’t have won all those championships if not for Sam Gilbert. The hell they wouldn’t have. They would have won them anyway.

Q: Do you want to say anything about Bill (Self) about or his integrity or …?

JAY BILAS: Yeah, I would. I’ve known Bill Self for geez, for almost 20 years now. And I know him to be of the highest integrity. So I don’t believe that he would actively participate in the violation of NCAA rules any more than I would believe Coach K or John Beilein would do that.

I don’t believe that. I believe I understand how the business works. I played. I am not naive. I know that hardly anybody was eligible when I played and hardly anybody is eligible now.


http://kuhoops.com/ku-basketball-news/209167479/

 

Because they didn't directly name maryland although we know it's them.

I don't think Preston and DeSousa are really similar though. Preston was a top 20 type player who would have likely started at most places right away, maybe not KU, Self seems to make freshmen earn it a bit more. DeSousa is an athletic kid but not polished, I don't think it was surprising he didn't play all that much.

I think a kid on Preston's level virtually everyone assumes the kid is getting something. All of these kids get something but at his level, I think it would be naive to say he didn't get some money. With DeSousa that may not be the case he wasn't an instant impact guy.

I know the story out there about him is that his commitment to KU was a big surprise but i didn't follow that recruitment so I really don't know if that's the case.

Both kids committed before the FBi story broke so the notion that this was done knowing about the FBI is not there. I agree that Self playing DeSousa if he knew he'd been paid was risky, and in his case I think he probably didn't know DeSousa had been paid. As you said he was really apparently paid by UA to go to Maryland. Then he wanted to go to KU, so they in effect bought out that deal. It depends what version you believe but the claim out there is that whoever got the money told Adidas we don't have it any more, we can't just give it back to UA, so Adidas paid it off. So if they paid 20K to buy him out, the implication is the family got 20K from UA, kept it, and then Adidas paid 20K in their name to get him out. So I would argue they got 20 K but got the BENEFIT of 40K ALso the way the story was written implies that DeSousa knew about it, so I expect the NCAA to suspend him, not clear for how long.

As to am I starting with the assumption of guilt absolutely, I've been saying this since the FBI story broke, most of these kids are getting money, to them, to their family etc. I have known this for yeras. We had scout guys on BRO 3 years ago telling us how the current setup worked and was designed to give coaches plausible deniability, what the FBI story exposed was almost exactly what they said. The difference was, there were actual coaches, assistants plus Pitino, named in the charges. That was something that surprised even the "experts."

Anybody that followed Preston's HS career closely would not have been surprised that he had eligibility issues, both academic and otherwise. So in his case I have a hard time believing Self didn't know going in there was a risk. i suspect after the FBI story broke, KU did what all schools did, who on our roster is at risk here, and chose to suspend him. I think that was the right move but I still am very skeptical they had no clue he'd been paid.

 

He completely contradicted himself at the end by admitting he knows hardly anybody is eligible and earlier having said people like Self, CoachK and Beilein participate in the violation of NCAA rules. If Jay Bilas knows most kids aren't eligible, clearly the coaches do too and yet they're playing them.

Unless he seriously wants me to bellieve that Duke, Kansas and Michigan are comparable. They're not, Duke is losing their entire starting 5, 4 of them were one and dones. One of them, Bagley has this huge story out there now about how his father went from BK and losing a home to foreclosure, to living in a million dollar gated development in SO Cal where his only source of income was Nike. There's no way Coach K didn't know that because it was well known. I've been saying all along I never got excited about the claims UCLA led for Bagley becaues I didn't think he'd qualify.

Kansas recruits at a notch below Duke, but they're getting elite kids. Michigan just doesn't recruit at that level. If you told me one of those 3 teams had ineligible plaeyrs I'd immediately guess Duke, I still think the EYBL stuff will ultimately reveal they had kids getting steered to Duke. The last of the 3 I would suspect is Michigan.

The victim stuff as a lawyer Bilas is being disingenuous. That term is used for a reason, the FBI is bringing federal charges and one of the requirements of doing it is there has to be a "victim". In order to do this, they determined the schools were victims playing guys who were actually ineligible defrauded the schools. I think the tone at the initial press conference was pretty clear, we have your playbook meant we know what the deal here is.

 

I don't have any issue with that, did anybody expect there was going to be actual evidence given to KU in that October review that they'd be required to document? That was just after the story broke, nobody had access to any information the FBI has, the kids and their parents aren't going to volunteer if they got paid so expecting Kansas to file a written report seems a bit silly.

 

On the Billy Preston thing.Ironically the kid I was hoping UCLA would get instead of Preston was Cody Riley. UCLA did get him, and he was one of the 3 kids who got caught shoplifting in China and missed his whole freshman year.

He also apparently has decided to test the waters and declared for the draft, without an agent. So 20 years old, never played above HS, 6'7" kid who's basically a 5, suspended a year for shoplifting and he decided to test the waters.

There are rumors he's not intending to come back to UCLA although nobody really knows.

So maybe Preston wasn't any worse.

 

I sure hope the NCAA doesn't go after Langford's dad here. Well if they do, they sure as hell better do it concurrently with going after Marvin Bagley's dad and Nike for doing the same thing, for more money, and longer period of time, so Nike could get Bagley to Duke.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/spor...ory.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ccfd67696d7f

 

FWIW Munish Sood the financial advisor in the case has plead guilty. He apparently cooperated with authorities so they waited until recently to charge him and he's not indicted he took a plea for lesser charges presumably because he gave them information.

 

THe Gatto trial has started, Adidas guy who got caught up in all this because the FBI said they had him on tape in the Bowen allegations.

Among tweets made today by Dan Wetzel, the attorney for Gatto said Oregon offered an "astronomical amount of money for Bowen" and the 100k for him to Louisville was to "level the playing field". Not clear if that means Oregon offered more than 100K but Bowen took less, because if it was less than 100K they wouldn't call it astronomical?

Also alleges Under Armour paid DeSousa 20K to go to Maryland(we already knew that) and that Arizona offered Nassir Little 150K. Note, he said Arizona not Nike, my understanding from the FBI stuff was that the bidding war was between shoe companies not universities in the Little case but Wetzel said the attorney said Arizona.

And that Dennis Smith Jr got 40K while at NC State, we already knew that too from the Yahoo stuff.