How Vegas helped bring down college basketball
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By Howie Lindsey of 790 KRD
EVERYONE ’ S DIRTY – some are just dirtier than others .”
That ’ s the line from an industry veteran that struck me . Everyone ’ s dirty ? Everyone ?
It was the early 2000s and I was in Las Vegas watching the next generation of basketball talent sweat it out in high school gymnasiums scattered around the desert .
At each gym – Chaparral over here , Cimarron Memorial over there , Desert Pines and Durango – were a dozen teams playing a half-dozen games . Every day in Las Vegas for a full week , the best of the best high school talent played against each other , first in round-robin games and then in a mock tournament .
At each gym , the people-watching was fantastic . AAU coaches , shoe company executives from Nike , Reebok and Adidas , former NBA players , current NBA players and scores of high-level college coaches mingled together on high school bleachers .
Imagine the absurdity of seeing Roy Williams , Rick Pitino and Jim Boeheim sitting just a few feet from each other on wooden bleachers watching the same game in a tiny , blistering hot gymnasium . And yet , there they were .
The Atlanta Celtics were the main draw with superstar center Dwight Howard ( NBA ) playing alongside 6-foot-11 bruiser Randolph Morris ( Kentucky ) and 6-8 , high-flying wing Josh Smith ( NBA ). There were stars from California like Arron Afflalo and Jordan Farmar ( UCLA ), an incredible wing from Maryland named Rudy Gay ( UConn ) and some amazing guards : Chicago-area shooter Shaun Livingston ( NBA ), Detroit ’ s Joe Crawford ( Kentucky ), Louisville ’ s Rajon Rondo ( Kentucky ) and New York ’ s Sebastian Telfair ( NBA ).
Many of the top stars in the 2005 class were in Vegas at the same time , future stars like Greg Paulus ( Duke ), Chris Douglas-Roberts ( Memphis ), Gerald Green ( NBA ), Andrew Bynum ( NBA ) and Tyler Hansbrough ( UNC ). The Seattle teams held future Louisville Cardinals Terrence Williams and Peyton Siva and a Southern California team was led by a young guard named Andre McGee .
I remember asking one of the veteran recruiting writers how this whole system worked . How do the coaches know who to watch ? How do the tournaments keep the coaches and the high schoolers separated ?
And how in the world can thousands of youngsters afford to fly to Las Vegas and stay in hotels for a week , not to mention the new shoes , new socks , new jerseys and new gym bags ?
“ What happens in Vegas , stays in Vegas ,” an assistant coach said with a smirk . Turns out it doesn ’ t . Fast forward to 2016 , the FBI arrested 10 people , four of them assistant basketball coaches , thanks , in part , to conversations recorded in a Las Vegas hotel room during the summer recruiting bonanza .
The FBI uncovered a scheme by agents and shoe company employees to funnel money to the parents of high school recruits and to pay assistants to use their influence to steer prospects toward future agents .
Those arrests , and the mention of a high school phenom named Brian Bowen being enticed to come to Louisville , broke open what could go down as the biggest scandal in college basketball history .
On the day of the arrests , Joon Kim , the U . S . Attorney for the Southern District of New York , put college basketball coaches and the high school basketball recruiting complex on notice . Kim vowed to expose “ the dark underbelly of college basketball .”
FBI agent Bill Sweeney said , “ Today ’ s arrests should serve as a warning to others choosing to conduct business in this way in the world of college athletes : We know your playbook . Our investigation is ongoing , and we are conducting additional interviews as I speak .”
After that day , Louisville suspended Rick Pitino , two assistant coaches and athletic director Tom Jurich . Since then , they ’ ve all been fired . Assistant coaches at Auburn , Arizona , Oklahoma State and USC were all suspended and then later fired .
Over that next week , hundreds of articles were written calling the arrests the “ tip of the iceberg .” We were all told that more arrests were imminent and the college basketball world would be rocked to its core .
Then there was a four-month period of relative
22 EXTOL SPORTS / MARCH 2018