No, I think you’re very naive to the reality of college athletics and think your favorite team hasn’t been shady as well which they undoubtedly have been because it’s the entire industry. Even those who have lived in Lexington or been around players could tell you some stories over the years.
This idea that the teams you hate do it but not your favorite team is exactly like those in the two political bases who think the other one is dirty but not their politicians when in reality it’s both).
The only reason you know the Kansas and Arizona stuff is because a criminal cut a deal and then got the fbi involved to go undercover and then talk Dawkins and his money guy to start giving money to coaches (who the feds considered a public official) instead of the families of players (which isn’t illegal and has been going on forever).
All of these programs have runners and in-betweens so they can have plausible deniability. You think the best recruits in the country go to other programs for cheating but came to Kentucky the first handful of Cal years why? Tradition? Lol
“If anyone thinks that there is such a thing as a clean big-time program, they need to wake up and smell the donkey s---,” Code wrote in his book. “Somewhere along the line, even the so-called cleanest of programs has some dirt if you look close enough.” - Merl Code (involved in the FBI NCAAB scandal) Full article
here
Code gladly supplied the grocery money to Lee Anderson then, just as he jumped in to secure a five-figure payment for Anthony Davis during his one season as a superstar at Kentucky.
Code was in on the ground floor with Davis as a rising phenom in Chicago, getting to know the family well. Code wrote that early in Davis’s time at Kentucky, in the fall of 2011, his father, “Big Ant,” was laid off from his job and the family was financially unstable. Here came Nike to the rescue, via Code.
“When I was on the pro side at Nike, I made numerous trips to Kentucky to see guys like Rajon Rondo, Eric Bledsoe, John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins and a few others. I had some solid relationships with folks in Lexington, so the first call I made was to a former assistant athletic director. He was no longer working in that capacity, but he was superconnected to some heavy hitters. …
“He thought on it and came back to me with a creative idea. He knew some guys that ran an apparel shop. ‘What if they created a T-shirt design? Would the family be okay if they got a healthy amount of the profits from the sales, so long as they don’t come back and sue us? We wanna make a play on his unibrow.’”
Shirts were designed and produced, and sales were brisk. “On Dec. 9, my guy in Lexington called me and said, ‘They’ve had some movement, made some sales. They’ve got 10 grand for the family right now. How do you wanna handle it?’ “
The next day, Kentucky was playing at Indiana in a big showdown game. Code says he drove from Chicago to Bloomington, met the assistant athletic director, received an envelope of cash and then delivered it to Davis’s mom before the game.
“These are really good people,” Code wrote. “That kid and his family deserved an opportunity to live without constantly worrying about keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table, especially while AD was generating tens of millions of dollars for everyone except himself. … I have no qualms about what we did to help them. Now, with athletes being permitted to profit off their names, images and likenesses, I actually feel vindicated in helping that family in the way that we did. It was the right thing to do—to hell with what the NCAA would have said at the time.”
Beyond that particular fundraising effort, some competitors in the college basketball world did not like the way Nike catered to Kentucky. Code wrote that he couldn’t much blame them. He recalled one particularly angry call from then Florida coach Billy Donovan.
Code’s recollection of Donovan’s rant: “I’m sick and tired of this bulls---! You motherf----rs keep helping Kentucky! This shit is ridiculous. I’m gonna call [Nike cofounder] Phil Knight personally to talk about this s--- because it’s getting out of hand.”
