The NBA’s developmental league has unveiled a program that could greatly loosen the NCAA’s grip on top high school basketball prospects. The league will begin offering what it calls “Select Contracts” that pay $125,000 for one year to just-graduated high school players who would rather forgo a one-and-done year at the…
In last month’s antitrust case in Oakland challenging the artificial caps on athlete compensation, the NCAA’s defense included the restatement of an imaginary economic principle that is fundamental to its existence: College athletes shouldn’t make money, the NCAA argued, because if players were paid above some magical…
The federal government’s wire fraud case against Christian Dawkins, Merl Code, and James Gatto for allegedly using Adidas’ money to pay college basketball recruits is nearing its conclusion, as the District Court judge in charge of the case reportedly told the jury today that deliberations could begin as early as…
As the federal wire fraud trial against James Gatto, Merl Code, and Christian Dawkins continues, with each new day bringing some new detail about the apparently widespread payment to young basketball players by companies like Adidas and agents looking to direct them to specific schools, it’s getting clearer and…
The more reports you read from the ongoing wire fraud case against three Adidas representatives, the more it becomes obvious that the world of basketball recruiting is churning with cash, such that the only reason anyone inside of it could conceivably resist paying college athletes officially is to protect a lot of…
Brian Bowen’s dad testified Thursday in the federal criminal trial of agent Christian Dawkins, Adidas executive James Gatto, and former Adidas operative Merl Code, who are accused of committing felony wire fraud as part of the FBI’s massive investigation of corruption in basketball recruiting. Bowen Sr. described…
LSU junior forward Wayde Sims was shot near a neighboring university’s campus early Friday morning. The 20-year-old was taken to a local hospital where he died of his injuries, according to Baton Rouge Police.
Over the last decade, athletes and reporters and professors and even shithead Kentucky governor Matt Bevin have come around to the idea of college athletes being compensated for their time and work. But one not-quite-disinterested group has been very noticeable and stubborn in its resistance to the idea. College…
Growing up in North Carolina, there isn’t a whole bunch that precedes college basketball. God (yes, of course). Family (well, depends on the family). But always in that top-three, above friends, work, and health, sits ACC basketball.
After four months, the external investigative team hired to look into multiple accounts of coaching abuse at Brandeis University determined that former men’s basketball head coach Brian Meehan’s abusive behavior did indeed go on unimpeded by athletic department and university leadership for years, as first reported by…
Not everything dredged up in the big FBI investigation of recruiting violations in college basketball is worth the attention of federal law enforcement. An apparel company funneling actual money to elite players so they’ll play for elite basketball programs, for example, is a function of a blackmarket created by the…
Mark Jurich, son of former Louisville athletic director Tom Jurich, is extremely, extremely pissed about the location of the 20 years’ worth of tickets granted to his family as part of his dad’s termination last autumn. The tickets are not the tickets they’re used to, and Mark is reading an awful lot of meaning into…
The NBA is steadily laying the foundation for the end of the rule requiring basketball prospects to wait a year after graduating from high school before declaring for the NBA Draft. Adam Silver has been making noise about this for a while, and Condoleezza Rice’s otherwise useless commission recommended it, and anyway…
Prosecutors say that Todd Moyer, who was a strength and conditioning coach for the MSU men’s basketball team, was texting with friends and Googling for strip clubs when he plowed his car into another in July 2017, killing a woman and her 5-year-old daughter.
RPI, the long-bemoaned metric used to determine who’s in and who’s out of the NCAA tournament for the past 37 years, is dead.
Duke’s multi-stage devastation of Canadian basketball continued Friday, in Toronto, with the vile Blue Devils pounding the bejeezus out of the poor Varsity Blues of the University of Toronto. Zion Williamson thrashed the feeble, excessively polite fellows of Ryerson Wednesday night, and although he continued to feast…
Last night, Zion Williamson played his first competitive game in a Duke jersey, opening a preseason road trip the Blue Devils have against some Canadian college teams. The trip opened against Ryerson, and Williamson put on a show.
Rick Pitino’s emotional distress lawsuit against Adidas—truly a bold “vehicle for proving that he had nothing to do with Adidas’ outrageous, wrongful, and illegal conspiracy” to put good basketball players onto his basketball team—was dismissed Tuesday by the U.S. District Court judge for the Western District of…
Gravity, hanging on by a thread, seemed to be the only remaining thing tying future Duke freshman star Zion Williamson to the rest of us mortals. Until Tuesday.
