https://www.si.com/college-basketball/2019/05/09/ncaa-trial-fbi-bribery-corruption-mark-emmert
The verdicts came down Wednesday in the second college basketball corruption trial in federal court in New York. Oh, you missed that? Don’t worry. Nearly everyone else did, too.
The investigation was announced with great fanfare after the arrests were made on the morning of Sept. 26, 2017. “We have your playbook,” FBI assistant director William Sweeney said at a press conference.
At one point, Kansas claimed it was the victim of a plot by the now-convicted Adidas employees. So that means that after the aforementioned victimization, Kansas dumped its Adidas apparel deal and and signed up with Nike or Under Armour or British Knights, right? Noooooooooope. The Jayhawks cut a new, richer deal with the Three Stripes last month.
Has the NCAA hammered Wade, Miller, Self or their schools? Nooooooooope. Wade was suspended from LSU’s last regular-game through the end of the Tigers’ NCAA tournament run, but he has since been reinstated. Miller missed a game near the end of the 2017–18 season but coached all year. Self never missed a game, but Kansas was more than happy to hang player Silvio De Sousa out to dry after bagman Gassnola dished on his recruitment during the first trial. Will the NCAA do anything to these coaches? Maybe. But it hasn’t so far.
I almost hope the NCAA does nothing from this point forward. This case generated such a huge collective yawn that no one in the public outside fans of LSU, Kansas and Arizona’s rivals actually cares what happens to the coaches at those programs. Other coaches within the sport and athletic directors at schools that aren’t competitive enough to team with shoe companies to buy players care deeply, but NCAA inaction in spite of more evidence than the NCAA’s enforcement department could ever hope to collect might finally prompt those people to admit what most of the public has already figured out. The only reason this system of handlers, middlemen and under-the-table payments exists is because the NCAA’s rules—which were voted into existence by the schools—created the market.
More immediately, this is the result we should expect after the FBI dove into the cesspool that is college basketball and emerged with Chuck Person and a bunch of guys most people had never heard of…