Basketball Scandal Highlights the Power of the Assistant Coach — and the Limits of Oversight

In the darker corners of the college basketball world — the places now under the searing spotlight of an FBI corruption probe — it is the assistant coach who often holds the power.

Assistant coaches don’t have the same pay or prestige as their head-coach bosses, but their job involves plenty of one-on-one interaction with players on the team.

That access to players has value for coaches willing to sell it. A trio of federal indictments handed down this week accuse four assistant coaches at top-tier programs of doing exactly that.

The federal criminal charges, which also ensnared an Adidas sportswear executive and several basketball-focused financial advisers and managers, have stunned the college-sports world. And the indictments also provide a behind-the-scenes look at how assistant coaches can serve as gatekeepers for college basketball programs — allowing certain outsiders to mingle with star players, for a price.

Are secret cash payments to assistant coaches and players at the heart of the problem, or simply a symptom of a larger, broken NCAA system? As the federal criminal cases move forward, with the potential for additional colleges to be named, that debate will continue.

Jamel K. Donnor, an associate professor of education at the College of William & Mary who co-edited a book on the history of college-sports scandals, said it’s too soon to know how far and wide the inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation will go. But this scandal, he said, “has the potential to be top five all-time.”

For now, the federal indictments reveal plenty of details, including that Christian Dawkins, a sports agent, viewed assistant coaches as “better” to work with than head coaches, because “then you got direct access” to the athletes. Mr. Dawkins is accused of making those comments during a March 3, 2016, meeting at a restaurant near the University of South Carolina’s Columbia campus. The meeting was secretly recorded by a financial adviser who is cooperating with the FBI.

At that meeting, investigators allege, Mr. Dawkins said that head coaches “ain’t willing to [take bribes] ‘cause they’re making too much money. And it’s too risky.”

Mr. Dawkins now faces criminal charges that include wire-fraud conspiracy, money-laundering conspiracy, and conspiracy to commit bribery. The indictments also brought criminal charges against James Gatto, an Adidas executive; Merl Code, an Adidas employee; Munish Sood, an investment adviser; and Jonathan Augustine, a program director for an Adidas-sponsored amateur basketball team for high-school-age teens.

The indicted assistant coaches are the University of Arizona’s Emanuel Richardson, the University of Southern California’s Anthony Bland, Auburn University’s Chuck Person, and Lamont Evans, who was an assistant coach at the University of South Carolina and, more recently, an associate coach at Oklahoma State University. Two other institutions, the University of Miami and the University of Louisville, are under investigation but have not had any coaches charged criminally.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association can hold head coaches responsible for violations that occur within their programs, meaning they could face NCAA penalties later. That rule, which the NCAA strengthened several years ago, exists because “these guys all know, by and large, what’s going on, or they’re purposely trying to not know what’s going on,” said Tom Yeager, a former commissioner of the Colonial Athletic Association and a former chair of an NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions.

A Clear Pattern

The specifics of how the secret payoffs worked varied by player, and by college, according to the indictments. But the overall pattern is clear: Outside businessmen who hoped to profit from the career tracks of promising young basketball players are accused of using college coaches to make sure that it all went according to plan. For employees of Adidas, federal prosecutors say, this meant making secret payments to guarantee that an elite high-school prospect chose to play college ball at an Adidas-branded university like Louisville.

In a July 10 phone call that was recorded by the FBI, Mr. Code, the Adidas employee, explained why the company helped orchestrate a $100,000 payment to a highly coveted high-school player. Mr. Code said this was “how stuff happens with kids and getting into particular schools and so this is kind of one of those instances where we needed to step up and help one of our flagship schools … you know, secure a five star caliber kid.”

Having such a standout player attend Louisville, Mr. Code said, was good for his company’s “potential business.”

In other alleged crimes outlined in the indictments, assistant coaches took bribes in exchange for steering their players to specific managers or financial advisers. Those figures stood to potentially make millions of dollars if the players went on to have successful NBA careers.

The assistant coaches paid little attention to the red flags surrounding Louis Martin (Marty) Blazer III, the financial adviser they were vouching for, and who last year was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with wire fraud.

Mr. Person, the Auburn assistant coach, falsely told a player’s mother that Mr. Blazer was his own financial adviser and had also given financial advice to the NBA analyst Charles Barkley. The player was willing to deal with Mr. Blazer because of Mr. Person’s endorsement.

“I trust him 100 percent,” the player was recorded saying.

Mr. Evans, who coached at both South Carolina and Oklahoma State, made the case for Mr. Blazer’s financial know-how by falsely telling one of his players that “he just opened a restaurant in Pittsburgh.”

Disavowing Wrongdoing

The universities implicated in the FBI investigation have been quick to distance themselves from their now-tainted coaches. Most have either been fired, suspended, or put on leave.

“The University of Arizona expects everyone who is part of our campus community to adhere to the highest ethical standards of behavior,” said its president, Robert C. Robbins, the day after the indictments were announced. “Arizona Athletics has a strong culture of compliance that begins at the top and extends throughout the organization. Specifically, the athletics department has a documented history of strengthening institutional control by being proactive and comprehensive through rules education and program monitoring.”

Other colleges implicated in the scandal also told The Chronicle that their athletics programs emphasize winning games the right way — through both training of new coaches and regular monitoring. The University of Louisville said its steps include a “new hire athletics compliance orientation,” “periodic in-person rules education,” and inserting language in coaches’ contracts about “expectations for coaches to be informed of, recognize and comply with NCAA, U of L and ACC rules.”

At Louisville’s home football and basketball games, in-game video messages remind all in attendance about the importance of NCAA compliance.

Yet it wasn’t until this latest FBI scandal that Louisville parted ways with the legendary men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino. The university placed Mr. Pitino on unpaid leave on Wednesday, and he is not expected to return to coaching there.

Several national media outlets are reporting, based on anonymous law-enforcement sources, that Mr. Pitino is the “Coach-2" mentioned in the FBI’s indictments. According to those indictments, Coach-2 was involved in the discussions about Adidas paying $100,000 to the high-school prospect in order to get him to commit to Louisville.

Mr. Pitino’s reputation has been tainted by various controversies throughout his career — including a 2015 scandal in which escorts were hired to lure potential Louisville recruits — but until now, he still had a job as a college head coach at a big-name school. Mr. Pitino was a proven winner on the court, and sometimes winning trumps everything.

“There’s a seedy underbelly to recruiting that people don’t want to see or hear about,” said Brendan Dwyer, a director of research & distance learning at the Center for Sport Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University. “There is a culture in athletics of, If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.”

Opinions differ as to whether the FBI’s sudden involvement in policing college sports will serve as a strong deterrent to future misconduct. But the investigative details released so far reinforce the fact that elite high-school and college basketball players are vulnerable to manipulation and pressure from older adults — whether relatives, handlers, or college coaches.

“I’m telling you, they look like men, but they’re kids,” Mr. Richardson, the Arizona assistant coach, said during a June 20 meeting that was recorded by the FBI. A month later, during a meeting in New Jersey, Mr. Richardson is accused of saying he would take advantage of his players’ malleability by steering them to Mr. Dawkins, the sports agent, in exchange for monthly bribes.

“I used to let kids talk to three or four guys, but I was like, why would you do that?” he was recorded as saying. “You know that’s like taking a kid to a BMW dealer, a Benz dealer, and a Porsche dealer. They like them all … you have to pick for them.”

Michael Vasquez is a senior investigative reporter. Follow him on Twitter @MrMikeVasquez, or email him at michael.vasquez@chronicle.com.