Think paying players is making a mess of college basketball? Wait until coaches are named

The biggest revelation to come out of the Yahoo Sports college basketball report is not that agents appear to have been doling out payments to college athletes.

It's that if these players took money, many of their coaches almost certainly took some first.

The FBI's investigation into corruption in college basketball has painted a very clear picture of a simple scheme with an obvious goal. Sports agents and financial advisers want a piece of a star athlete's paycheck but they need some help.

They try to reach a parent, a trusted family member or someone acting as a handler.

To do that, they often go through an assistant coach.

And if you think it causes problems when a player may have been involved in this kind of scheme, just wait until you see what happens when a coach's name gets dropped in there.

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Just ask Tony Bland, Lamont Evans, Chuck Person and Book Richardson, the four former assistant coaches facing felony charges in the FBI's investigation after they allegedly accepted bribes to wield their influence over players and their families.

Just ask Rick Pitino and Tom Jurich.

A player getting a free meal can be repaid. But a coach taking a bribe destroys trust in a university, trust in those tasked with upholding the sanctity of amateur athletics, and most important, trust players and families have placed in coaches to work in their best interest.

But if the FBI's probe has shown us anything, it's that coaches can serve as keystones in the bridges between athletes and advisers.

'We have your playbook'

The FBI's allegations show just how much sports agent and former ASM Sports employee Christian Dawkins needed assistant coaches to secure a steady stream of NBA-bound players as clients. 

The FBI alleges he was recorded saying, "... agents obviously have influence, but you gotta get the college coaches too" because "it's almost like you skipping a step if you just deal with agents" and that the path to securing athletes as clients was through assistant coaches because head coaches "ain't willing to (take bribes) 'cause they're making too much money. And it's too risky."

The success of Dawkins' purported business plan hinged on cooperation from college coaches willing to accept bribes because, as the FBI alleged he said of "elite" college coaches while being recorded, "... if you're gonna fund those kind of guys, man, I mean like we'd be running college basketball."

And it's clear the FBI, based on the pattern it described, saw exactly how this all worked, too.

“We have your playbook,” New York FBI Assistant Director in Charge William Sweeney said on Sept. 26 when the complaints were made public.

But if assistant coaches were needed for the plan to work, why were they absent from Friday's Yahoo Sports report showing spreadsheets and other documents reportedly seized from ASM Sports?

Maybe they were there after all.

Loans to players or for players?

The window the FBI has provided into the collaboration between these agents and coaches makes me wonder: What if we're taking the ASM Sports ledgers too literal and players weren't paid these "loans" at all?

What if that was more a notation than a definition? 

And, hear me out, what if those were all actually payments to players' respective college coaches or handlers? What if they weren't loans to players but loans for players? Some players may not have even known money was being paid to people close to them.

It's not as unbelievable as it sounds.

While Yahoo Sports' documents appear to be meticulous records, what's more dangerous: paying athletes or paying bribes to college coaches?

An agent could pay a player and likely walk away without attracting government attention while the school deals with NCAA compliance issues. But pay a college coach at a publicly funded university and you might end up like Dawkins, who is facing felony charges of bribing an agent of a federally funded organization.

Is it possible that calling the payments loans and listing players' names rather than coaches posed less of a legal issue should a situation like this ever arise?

Next, remember that the FBI already alleged a college coach accepted a bribe under the guise of a loan meant to be "offset" by steering players to a pair of advisers.

In its investigation into former Auburn assistant Chuck Person, the FBI alleges a cooperating witness posing as a financial adviser and Rashan Michel, a suit maker and former NBA referee, plotted to give the Auburn associate head coach a $50,000 loan that could be forgiven in increments of $10,000 to $15,000 for each athlete he could send their way.

Michel said it was possible this might work so well, in fact, that he and the FBI's witness might actually owe Person money, according to the FBI complaint.

Finally, as for why they'd structure a deal this way, Michel believed labeling the alleged bribe payment as a loan kept the transaction looking "clean," according to the FBI complaint.

"Michel advised that, by reducing the loan to writing (a promissory note), they would make the transaction appear 'the right way' and 'clean,' so that 'it don't hurt nobody,'" according to the FBI complaint.

But what do we know?

Even though we now know more about the possible depth of corruption in college basketball than we did a week ago, Friday's news also proves the FBI knows far, far more.

We don't know exactly what the funds listed in those spreadsheets were used for. We don't know exactly which teams and coaches will ultimately be implicated if more documents are released, either through leaks or through court cases.

But we can know one thing: If a similar list surfaces with the names of coaches, things just got worse.

Chris White: 502-582-4367; ccwhite@courierjournal.com; Twitter: @chriswhite_lcj. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: www.courier-journal.com/chrisw