“We have your playbook.” — William Sweeney of the FBI’s New York field office, Sept. 26, 2017.
Those words laced with false bravado launched a six-year stumble down a college basketball rabbit hole to nowhere. We have finally emerged, dumber for the experience—or at least far more cynical. The feds led us on a futile trek that wasted time and wrecked lives and—as usual—let the powerful skate while a few mid-level lieutenants got pinched. By the time it was finally over, the “crimes” themselves had become an anachronism in a changing college athletics world.
They had the playbook, all right. Then they barely opened it before tossing it to the NCAA and its incompetent Frankenstein creation, the IARP, which bumbled and dawdled its way to a series of low-impact rulings before being run out of business on account of its own monumental inefficiency. This was the IARP’s final act, issuing a Kansas infractions case ruling Wednesday that downgraded the charges against the program and predictably gave the blueblood Jayhawks a complete pass, with nothing more substantive than three years of probation. This wasn’t even a slap on the wrist; it was a pat on the back.
Denny Medley/USA TODAY Sports
“Anyone that followed the NCAA rules and guidelines just found out once and for all,” one coach texted me. “The joke was on them.”
The culmination of this saga comes with that full-circle realization: skirting NCAA rules was and is good for business. Winners do what it takes, suckers follow the bylaws. Rock Chalk, Jayhawk.
The federal investigation of corruption in college basketball arrived with a thunderclap of a press conference from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York. There were serious men in suits making grave pronouncements, Sweeney among them. There were flow charts depicting the cycle of corruption that was the everyday reality of high-level recruiting in college hoops. There were FBI raids of homes and offices. There were arrests. There were wiretaps. There was video surveillance. There were undercover agents.
The sausage factory was about to be cracked open for public viewing.
And then … not much happened. Prosecutors were content busting ten role players hustling to do their jobs in basketball’s underground economy—shoe reps and agent runners and assistant coaches, almost all of them Black. The NCAA was content hammering Oklahoma State, and only Oklahoma State. So much for the afterglow of the big sting operation.
Whether those arrested were doing anything criminal was subject of considerable debate, with the government making the dubious claim that those very coaches and shoe reps risking their necks to land players actually were defrauding the schools. (Surely, Kansas and Arizona and Louisville and LSU and North Carolina State and Auburn didn’t actually want that top talent, by any means necessary, right?)
The feds never bothered subpoenaing the big fish, much less charging them with anything. The millionaire head coaches, the high-level shoe company employees, the entirety of Nike—those inside the gated community of college basketball didn’t have to wake up to armed law enforcement pounding on their doors one September morning.
Looking for an easy win, prosecutors nailed four assistant coaches: Emanuel “Book” Richardson of Arizona; Chuck Person of Auburn; Tony Bland of USC; and Lamont Evans of Oklahoma State. They and others were sentenced to jail time or community service, their careers derailed. Meanwhile, their bosses went to the familiar scandal response, practicing their shocked faces in the mirror before proclaiming they had no idea this sort of player buying was going on. It was laughable in the court of public opinion, but enough to keep them out of actual criminal court—and enough to dupe the dopes with the IARP.
Yes, Rick Pitino was fired at Louisville. Sean Miller eventually was fired at Arizona. Will “Strong-Ass Offer” Wade went down at LSU. But they’ve all since re-emerged, gotten other head-coaching jobs and been given second chances.
Bill Self? The king of Kansas was never threatened with unemployment. He had national championship clout, at a place that has always been obsessed with basketball greatness. (Pitino had that same clout, but that wasn’t enough to protect him after an accumulation of scandals at Louisville.) The school rallied around him, fired back at allegations, embraced nonsensical victim status, even took the crass and gross step of trying to gouge $1 million out of Adidas rep Jim Gatto for daring to help Self land top-tier talent. Gatto, not a rich man, agreed in court to pay six figures in restitution to Kansas, in addition to also paying sums to Louisville and North Carolina State.
Kansas eventually got around to suspending Self and assistant coach Kurtis Townsend four games to start the 2022-23 season. But that was after it awarded him a lifetime contract, and after he won the 2022 national title, his second at the school. He was worth circling the wagons for.
Self was texting buddies with Adidas street hustler T.J. Gassnola, a self-described bag man who testified as a cooperating witness for the prosecution in federal court about funneling money to the families of Kansas recruits Billy Preston and Silvio De Sousa. In a text exchange that was admitted as evidence, Self told Gassnola that he was happy with Adidas but the Jayhawks “just need to get a couple real guys.”
Gassnola replied: “In my mind, it's KU, Bill Self. Everyone else fall into line. Too (expletive) bad. That’s what's right for Adidas basketball. And I know I'm right. The more you have lottery picks and you happy. That's how it should work in my mind."
"That's how ur (sic) works. At UNC and Duke," Self replied, referring to two Nike flagship programs. Gassnola responded by mentioning a third major Nike program, Kentucky.
This was a sausage-factory snapshot: instead of being defrauded by shoe reps, coaches wanted and expected their help recruiting. This called into question how the feds could classify that help as criminal, but it without question exposed potential major NCAA violations. In the pre-Name, Image and Likeness world, directly paying recruits to attend a school was impermissible (and is still supposed to be, by letter of the bylaw).
But from the beginning, the transition of an overblown criminal case to a series of major NCAA infractions cases was beset with problems. The feds told the NCAA to stand down until the trials were over, for starters, and they were not overly cooperative in sharing the mountains of information they had culled. Then the pandemic hit, grinding investigations to a halt for months.
Meanwhile, the NCAA’s Mark Emmert-appointed, Condoleezza Rice-led committee created to address the crisis in college basketball recommended formation of the IARP. That decision was based in common sense—to go outside the NCAA’s member-driven apparatus to create a fully independent body to investigate and judge major cases. It became a disaster in real-world application, loosely akin to hiring a bunch of lawyers to take over an engineering firm’s hardest jobs.
They made a slow process slower, cost a fortune in billable hours, and ultimately delivered rulings that seemed divorced from the reality of college sports. The NCAA, already one of the world’s weakest watchdogs, became even more impotent but creating Amateur Hour with the IARP.
In August 2022, the NCAA announced that it was sunsetting the IARP for much the same reason ESPN stopped trying to sell phones earlier this century. They weren’t good at it and almost everyone hated the product. The Kansas case was its final act.
Out of all the cases that sprang from that FBI investigation, only Oklahoma State—which had a limited scope of violations—got a postseason ban. Out of all the millionaire coaches whose programs were caught up in the probe, none were given anything more severe than a 10-game suspension (stand up, Will Wade). Gatto, Christian Dawkins, Merl Code, Richardson, Person, Bland, Evans and others paid the price for everyone else.
The FBI had the playbook on how the underground economy worked in college basketball. It read the Cliffs Notes version instead, using that to send a few people to jail, then moved on. The NCAA’s follow-up mission has now ended in an echo chamber of laughter from those it investigated.
At least now this stumble down the rabbit hole to nowhere is finally over.
