Heads are beginning to roll in yet another college sports scandal. I guess it should come as no surprise to those of us who love college basketball that this is happening. The irony is that all of this has been happening right under the nose of the NCAA but "unbeknownst" to them and it's the FBI that is exposing the corruption.

College athletics has become big money for the power conferences and the NCAA and the big name programs are the NCAA's cash cows. Little wonder that this kind of stuff happens on the NCAA's watch and goes unnoticed until something so egregious happens that they have to go public and act surprised. For example, UNC is still awaiting the outcome of their academic fraud scandal and Louisville is still being investigated for providing "escorts" to potential recruits. The little guys get hammered hard and fast by the NCAA but the elite programs fly under the radar and investigations drag out forever.

The union of corporate greed with "win at all costs" college athletic programs is the bane of amateur, college athletics. It's made a mockery of the amateur, college student-athlete ideal at the highest levels of college sports. What a shame.

The downfall of Rick Pitino:

https://www.aseaofblue.com/2017/9/27/16371900/rick-pitino-louisville-cardinals-kentucky-wildcats

Article about what the FBI investigation could eventually change in college basketball:

Excerpts: "As more schools are ensnared by this investigation, a more equitable future for college basketball could emerge, where major universities like Louisville, and the similarly implicated University of Arizona, have less of a stranglehold on the sport as they lose the ability to throw around cash. But it’s not just the schools that are now on notice. So too are corrupt AAU coaches, self-interested financial advisers, and multinational apparel companies with a stake in all of it."

"While the game has months of bad headlines ahead of it, if this is the end of what acting U.S. attorney Kim called the “dark underbelly of college basketball,” then it’s a good thing. And if it leads the NCAA to try to stamp out opportunities for bribery by ending the farce of forced amateurism, then it’s even better."

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/explaining-the-fbis-college-basketball-investigation.html

Excellent article about the inevitable problems of the multi-million dollar, college basketball industry being marketed as amateurism:

Excerpt: "Yes, laws were broken, and the coaches and shoe company executives involved should be punished. They abused the trust they’d earned from players to stuff their pockets.

Yet, what are we really talking about here?

Because the feds’ report charging Chuck Person (Auburn), Lamont Evans (Oklahoma State), Emanuel Richardson (Arizona), and Tony Bland (Southern Cal) with fraud and conspiracy can’t be surprising. Not because those four coaches already had raised our suspicion. But because they operate in a morally cloudy system.

And everyone knows it.

That’s what happens when a business is marketed as amateurism. A sleight-of-hand the NCAA has pulled off for decades.

Well, this week’s news may finally change that. The fallout could be seismic."

http://www.freep.com/story/sports/2017/09/27/college-basketball-scandal-louisville-rick-pitino-one-and-done/709273001/

If you love college basketball it is worth your time to read the article I have linked below. It is a disturbing, eye-opening, hard hitting article by a journalist from the Indianapolis Star about how the staggering amount of money from athletic shoe companies is involved with the NCAA, colleges and college coaches and how that has led to rampant cheating:

Excerpt: "Abject greed has put college basketball where it is today. The naked and unseemly lust for the wrong kind of money led it here, into the middle of an FBI investigation, with several coaches under arrest and one legend defrocked and more of both, so much more, to come. More arrests. More defrocking. This is the comeuppance of college basketball, but the guilty parties are not just the seedy coaches, the greedy parents, the oily Adidas executive and the slithering agents.

College and university presidents are to blame, too. Because it is their abject greed, their naked and unseemly lust for the wrong kind of money, that let this happen.

By arresting an Adidas executive and laying bare a series of schemes that saw money gushing from a shoe company and into the hands of recruits and their families — with the trade-off being those recruits would play for the right school, sign with the right agent and wear the right sneaker — the FBI has confirmed that the NCAA doesn’t run NCAA basketball.

Shoe companies do."

http://www.indystar.com/story/sports/columnists/gregg-doyel/2017/09/28/ncaa-presidents-blame-college-basketball-scandal-fbi-rick-pitino-louisville/711098001/