NCAA B-ball Coaches, Adidas Executive Face Charges Over Exploiting Amateurism Rules and HS Athletes

[Steel]

[quote]At one major university, a sports agent arranged for a quid pro quo among Adidas, the college’s men’s basketball program and a top high school prospect in which the player’s family would receive $100,000 if he committed to the school and signed with the apparel giant once he turned pro.

At another college, the basketball team’s associate head coach accepted nearly $100,000 to steer his team’s top players to a financial adviser eager to manage their future N.B.A. riches. At a third, a top assistant set up a similar arrangement, promising to trade his access to players for bribes.

“Some of it can’t be completely accounted for on paper,” the sports agent said in urging discretion about one of the deals, “because some of it is, whatever you want to call it, illegal.”

These and many more allegations were revealed in a series of complaints made public by federal investigators in New York on Tuesday. The complaints depict a thriving black market for teenage athletes, one in which coaches, agents, financial advisers and shoe company employees trade on the trust of players and exploit their inability to be openly compensated because of N.C.A.A. amateurism rules.

“For these men, bribing coaches was a business investment,” Joon H. Kim, the acting United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said while announcing federal bribery, fraud and other corruption charges. “They knew corrupt coaches, in return for bribes, would pressure the players to use their services. They also knew that if and when those young players turned pro, that would mean big bucks for them.”

This vision of what Kim called “the dark underbelly of college basketball” led to the arrests of nearly a dozen people, including four Division I assistant coaches and the global marketing director for Adidas basketball. Kim said the investigation was continuing, and the disclosures made on Tuesday seemed to promise further revelations of wrongdoing that could upend one of the country’s most popular sports, whose annual tournament provides the N.C.A.A. with the vast majority of its income.

Across three complaints, two broad schemes were alleged. One involved bribing four assistant coaches — at Arizona, Auburn, Oklahoma State and Southern California, all programs in the so-called Power 5 conferences of college sports — to persuade players to send business to certain financial advisers once they turned professional. The other involved efforts to secretly funnel money from Adidas to three players and their families in exchange for the players’ commitments to play at two Adidas-sponsored college programs and to later sign sponsorship deals with the company once they turned pro.

The latter complaint said a senior Adidas executive, Jim Gatto, was in on an agreement to pay about $100,000 to the family of “Player-10,” a heavily recruited high school standout, to steer him to a particular college. While neither the player nor the university was named, descriptions of the institution matched the University of Louisville, which this summer signed a 10-year, $160 million apparel contract with Adidas. Louisville’s men’s basketball program is currently on N.C.A.A. probation over a scandal in which prostitutes were used to entice recruits in on-campus housing (the university is appealing some of those penalties, which were announced in June).

Adidas said in a statement: “Today, we became aware that federal investigators arrested an Adidas employee. We are learning more about the situation. We’re unaware of any misconduct and will fully cooperate with authorities to understand more.”[/quote]
[url=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/sports/ncaa-adidas-bribery.html]NY Times[/url], [url=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/sports/rick-pitino-fired.html]the coach at Louisville Rick Pitino has been placed on unpaid leave[/url], and was already on probation with prior things so it's only a matter of time before he is terminated.