Will KU coach Bill Self have courage to make change in wake of Adidas trial revelations?
Bit by tantalizing bit, the truth of how college basketball operates is spilling out of a courtroom in New York. And at some point the NCAA is going to decide between two paths:
Continue to do what has so far been best for its profitability, or decide to now do what’s best for its credibility.
Bit by tantalizing bit, the truth of how high-profile coaches perform a sort of shadow dance with largely anonymous street brokers armed with grand ambition and grander expense accounts is being better understood by the public. And at some point, eight-figure coaches like Kansas’ Bill Self are going to decide between two paths:
Continue with this mostly unspoken code that prioritizes plausible deniability and leaves everyone involved diminished for the trouble, or push from the inside for sensible change that history will remember as overdue but right.
Change can happen, but it will require some who currently benefit from the status quo to speak out and risk some professional capital. Nobody is better positioned for this than Self, a Hall of Fame inductee and national champion who’s already made tens of millions and can make even more in the NBA whenever he chooses.
That his top assistant was caught on an FBI wiretap discussing possible payment for a top recruit that ended up choosing Duke is all the more reason to push for change. On Tuesday, defense attorneys in the trial tried to get admitted into evidence a tape recording on which KU assistant coach Kurtis Townsend was told that the family of prized recruit Zion Williamson was seeking money and housing in exchange for a commitment.
Townsend’s response on that tape: “If that’s what it takes to get him for 10 months, we’re going to have to do it some way.”
The worst kept secret in sports — that shoe companies pay and often dictate where top recruits go to school — is being exposed in a court of law.
Everyone involved should be embarrassed that it’s come to this, but more accurately, everyone involved should be embarrassed that it’s still coming to this. After all these years and all these decades.
The NCAA’s arrogant and delusional rules have always incentivized those involved to color outside the lines. This is not a new phenomenon, wasn’t new 18 years ago when Myron Piggie pleaded guilty of paying the Rush brothers, and wasn’t new a decade before that when a twice-convicted sports fixer was photographed in a hot tub with three players from UNLV’s basketball team.
This has always been college basketball’s ugly and inconvenient truth, the whole thing so baked into the sport’s fabric that some coaches have long differentiated between “legal” cheating and “cheating cheating.”
Legal cheating typically works like this: a shoe company pays the relative of a high-profile recruit, say, $100,000 to operate a sort of pop-up AAU team. The company knows the team’s cost might just be half that amount, leaving the rest for the relative to share or pass with the recruit.
In a more sensible world, that’s not even the part that would’ve spurred action. No, the part that would’ve spurred action is that the shoe company’s take in this transaction is so indirect and hopeful — some marginal return on helping a particular college program win, and the unenforceable expectation that the recruit will sign for more money if and when he becomes a marketable professional.
That should have told the NCAA that the system was broken, that if the rules made up by a bureaucracy were regularly and brazenly broken by a free market that valued the talent involved so much more than the rules allowed, then something needed to change.
But the NCAA found comfort in those rules, because barring athletes from being paid had a doubly beneficial effect: It meant more cash for the suits in charge, and a fairytale of college kids working hard for school pride to sell to a customer base that’s always wanted to be fooled.
The system has benefited too many to be curtailed. The coaches have become rock stars, the rules give cover for athletic departments to load up on six-figure-salaried administrators, and they all eat well off the residual glory of the games themselves.
The only ones who don’t benefit are the athletes who wear the pressure and work of their million-dollar coaches in exchange for a benefits package that does not include a salary but does include an education many of them have been pushed to disregard.
That system is taking its hardest challenge in years, because the FBI has been convinced to spend time and resources prosecuting actions that benefit the situation’s closest stand-ins for victims, who are criminalized only by rules that have never been sensible or fair to anyone but those who create them.
The laughable part of the NCAA’s vision of amateur athletics has always been that no sports bureaucracy is more closely tied to profit. The charade of amateurism has been good for business, and that’s why it’s lasted this long, even as an increasing portion of the customer base is at least generally aware of the lie.
The NCAA has had decades to do what’s right, and it’s always chosen what’s profitable, so the decision going forward won’t be about fairness. It’ll be about marketing. The NCAA will weigh whether to continue pushing a fairytale that by now only the purposely delusional can believe is a better business decision than honesty.
The NFL did not act on head injuries in football until it was pushed to do so by financial incentives, and the NCAA is not going to change the way it achieved power until so many overpriced and redundant administrators are convinced it’s in their own self-interest to do so. They must be pushed by some combination of public opinion and those with power acknowledging that the status quo is both dishonest and untenable.
This is the way the world works, and it’s always been the way the NCAA works, even as it’s spent loads of money to convince you otherwise.
The strand of plausible deniability onto which Self and others in his sport can publicly hold onto is both thin and believable only in the law’s terms of reasonable doubt.
In rare cases, some do know exactly what’s happening — who pays whom, how much, when and how those payments will be leveraged for or against their program.
Far more often, the coaches are intentionally left without details or provable knowledge. That benefits all sides, but it does have the messy side effect of leaving the rule-breaking to those who aren’t required to follow the rules.
Self knows this is his sport’s reality, and so do North Carolina’s Roy Williams and Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, despite the Casablanca claims both have made in recent days.
The promise of this FBI investigation and this current trial is that they show under-the-table payments are not just for the blue bloods. Kansas and Duke and North Carolina and Kentucky have been mentioned, but so have Iowa State and Creighton and Washington.
The rules are not broken by merely the few — and the rules that aren’t broken are seemingly few.
Sensible change is long overdue. Let shoe companies and agents pay recruits. As long as the risk is on the adults — athletes are free to take the money and eventually sign with a competitor — then who is harmed? It’s happening anyway, except market forces and artificial rules are literally turning it into a federal investigation.
If the rules are loosened, athletes can get more of their fair value, coaches aren’t pushed into these dark corners and use of code words, and shoe companies would be given the legitimacy they deserve after funding an enterprise that’s already made millionaires of so many.
If it can be proven that Self or any other coach knew about a payment and played the athlete anyway, that coach will be deservedly fired and shamed. But that’s an entirely naive pursuit, one that would guarantee nothing more than a promotion for an FBI investigator to work more useful cases. Any coach fired for breaking rules will be replaced by another just as likely to break the same rules.
This system needs an overhaul, or this obnoxious cycle will continue — feigned outrage that a handful of recruits are being paid a small fraction of the value placed on them by a free market.
That change can start now, and Self or anyone else with major-program power can be the catalyst.
But, no big deal either way. If those in charge fail to act, they’ll have another chance soon, and another soon after that, on and on until someone with the right combination of security and sense has the courage to speak up.
Sam Mellinger
Sam Mellinger is a Kansas City Star sports columnist.
This story was originally published October 16, 2018 at 7:59 PM.