B1G/NCAA basketball

[THE_WIZARD_]

Like wiz says...

shaddup

[CGVT]

Who's Wiz?

[Jeff Buchanan]

Excuse or reason? Buchanan chooses to write multiple enclyclopedias daily and Wiz farts all day. No room for "nothing in the middle"? This shit isn't that deep dude. I have in person people I talk to about shit as well.

Admit it, you read them and hang on every word.

Say after me .... E-N-C-Y-C-L-O-P-E-D-I-A-S

[Jeff Buchanan]

Like out friend Polonius says, "Brevity if the soul of wit."

You too dumb ass ..... get your fingers right.

[The Oracle]

Who's Wiz?

Sorry, fat fingers again. Jiz.

[The Oracle]

Admit it, you read them and hang on every word.

Say after me .... E-N-C-Y-C-L-O-P-E-D-I-A-S

Mixed bag here.

[Hannibal]

So, anyway, Pitino getting canned is a slap?

For the institution?

If it is not accompanied by additional punishment that deters the future hiring of a dirty coach -- yes, it is a slap. The institution blames the problem on one bad apple and pretends that they are shocked and horrified by it. That is the strategy that I have referred to a few times as "cauterizing the wound". Louisville is no worse off today than if they had hired a clean coach who regularly made the tournament as an 8 seed and never won a national championship. Ditto for Ole Miss and Hugh Freeze or OSU and Jim Tressel, and anyone for whom firing a dirty winning coach is supposed to be "punishment".

You want to incentivize institutions to stop hiring dirty coaches? Levy punishments that outweigh the benefits. That means (at least) multiple years with significant scholarship penalties and post season bans. Make the on-the-field or on-the-court product suck for a while so that the fans will remember the aftermath and never want to hire another dirty coach. Also, get rid of bullshit "vacating" victories and go back to full-fledged forfeits, which is how it used to be done. It's not as if anything that I'm asking for is Draconian or unprecedented. Quite the opposite, in fact.

But it won't happen. Even with this new scandal. My prediction is that the NCAA will not dish out any deterring punishments as a result of this, despite everyone's predictions that this time, it's different. Coaches will be fired, and victories will be vacated. At most, maybe some teams will get a one year post season ban in a year where they probably would have just made the NIT. People will move on and recruiting for college revenue sports will continue to be as dirty and slimy as it is today.

[iam416]

Counts I and II. Based on 18 USC 666(a) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/666

The premise of the law is defrauding the University (or government entity). A person, by fraud or other wrongful acts, causes someone to own property that is rightfully the University's.

The allegations of overt facts are only that everyone got paid. There is no actual allegation of an overt fact as to how someone was defrauded.

Count III. Pure fraud with a nice kicker -- "honest services" (18 USC 1343, 1346) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1346. "...the term “scheme or artifice to defraud” includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services." The Supreme Court has held that this remarkably vague language, in order to actually be Constitutional, means "fraudulent schemes to deprive another of honest services through bribes or kickbacks supplied by a third party who ha[s] not been deceived." Circuit courts have further limited by saying that at the time of the fraud it must have been reasonably foreseeable that the scheme potentially might be detrimental to the employer's economic well-being.

In this case the allegation is that Person is bribed and the potential material harm to Person's employer has to be NCAA-related.

So those are the actual criminal counts (plus 18 USC 1952 which is also fraud).

The fraud allegations are the laughable "scholarship" one + the depriving the University to right to make decisions as to who gets scholarships (lmao) + bringing in risk of NCAA violations.

So, for the record, here are the elements of garden variety fraud:

1. Intentional misrepresentation
2. To a third party not knowing it's a misrepresentation
3. The misrepresentation is material in the third party's decision
4. That decision damages the third party.

So, we ain't talking about the players. They aren't the ones being defrauded. The entity being defrauded, according to the FBI, is the University. The principle way the University is being damaged or could be damaged is via NCAA rules violations. In fact, the complaint includes an entire section on the NCAA and its rules. An interesting question for me concerns the University's knowledge of the "lie." As mentioned above, you can't be defrauded if you know it's a lie. We typically impute knowledge to the organization only through it's officers. But isn't a head basketball coach pretty damn close to that? Isn't an AD?

What you have is, IMO, criminalizing NCAA rule violations. Nothing more. Some may agree with this, but I really don't. If you want to cheat, fine -- the organization that you cheat is the one that handles it. Not the FBI.

I'll give two examples. First, when I was a young associate, I probably received 15 headhunter calls a year -- calls from people paid by another employer to steer me to that employer. The act of taking money to steer or push anyone in a certain direction is not wrong, especially when it's eyes wide open.

Second, to illustrate how ludicrous this is criminally -- imagine if the NE Patriots had taken $10,000 from the Federal Government. If they had, then they'd be in the same boat as the Universities. And as such:

1. Knowingly deflating balls in a way that broke NFL rules;
2. Representing to the NFL and Officials the balls complied with the rules (lie);
3. Those representations causing the NFL to use those balls;
4. Those representations causing its fans to believe they were complying with NFL rules
5. Those representations resulting in economic damage to both the league and the fans in the absence of Tom Brady from 4 football games and costing the NFL gads of money in investigatory and legal fees.

That's the framework of what's happening here. I'm a process person. All the way. The means matter to me. And this one really strikes me wrong. Hopefully the criminal case will go away and the evidence gathered will be used by the NCAA and APPROPRIATE punishments meted out -- by appropriate, I mean civil, not criminal.

[whodean]

B1G/NCAA basketball

Louisville's AD was canned too

Talent I take it you have rescinded that prior statement [emoji1]


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Hannibal]

Yeah I was a little confused as to what everyone was actually getting arrested for.

In the past, when the FBI has overlapped with the NCAA, it has been because there has been some sort of super shady underworld figure involved and some sort of potential money laundering was going on.

[iam416]

They got Baylor 15 years ago for falsifying test scores. But that was actually defrauding the University -- they University admitted them and gave them a scholarship based, in part, on meeting minimal qualifications. That is, at least, colorable. More than colorable -- people were convicted.

All of this money doesn't affect the University's decision. That's the crux of "MATERIAL misrepresentation" when it comes to fraud. I can sell you my car and maybe lie about the last time I had the interior cleaned; but I can't lie about it being in 5 car pile up. The former is not fraud; the latter is.

No University is going to tell a head ball coach that a qualified student can't come to their school if that coach wants them. This isn't some sort of roundtable where Gordon Gee sits down with Urban Meyer to decide who they should take as their QB.

[Da Geezer]

I have my own ideas, but, in Bowen's case, who got hurt that it would lead to an FBI sting operation in the Southern District? I mean, I see the NCAA violation, no question. But Bowen gets his 100k, Louisville gets its player, and Adidas gets a 5* future pro to wear its brand. Who is harmed enough for this to be a federal criminal case? As Talent said, the implication is that the university didn't know that any of this was going on (and was thus defrauded). Why then fire the Athletic Director? If he knew, shouldn't that be enough to say that the university knew?

I understand the breach of the "honest services contract" in the coaches taking kickbacks for directing their players to agencies or clothing companies. Got it. But I have trouble with the Louisville situation.

[Jeff Buchanan]

talent makes a clear case that the elements of a crime aren't present at least in his recap of available information and legal precedent (thanks for that).

So, we're left again with the elephant in the room: With thousands of pages of rules and regulations published by the NCAA to uphold the vague standard of amateurism in collegiate sports, none of it is effective.

I get why the NCAA tries to hold on. It is a massive organization with a big payroll. Who wants to lose that. So, you've got momentum to continue it even though it a massive FAIL. It's easy to identify that problem. I'm not sure how it is supposed to be solved.

I think college athletics, at least at the Division 1 level, is headed toward some kind of mechanism to end the amateurism BS and let athletes get paid. I know, this hurts the little guys and gasp, women's sports, as the big guys will get all the good players and their won't be a huge amount of demand for Field Hockey players. So what. It is stupid to hold on to that kind of nonsensical reasoning.

The top end of collegiate athletics, namely the P5 members, are becoming overwhelmed by the way business is actually conducted, e.g., college basketball, and the way some NCAA old farts (and I'd add the University Presidents) think it ought to be conducted.

Wake up ..... it's a fucking business. Get with the program!

[The Oracle]

Bowens suspended, doubt he plays this year.

[entropy]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/sports/north-carolina-ncaa-academic-scandal.html?smid=tw-share

North Carolina going to get away with it...?