The FBI’s criminal complaint that shook the college basketball world Tuesday and led to 10 arrests included accounts of three meetings in Las Vegas.

… The Review-Journal on Wednesday reviewed the complaint and found three meetings in Las Vegas between March and July involving coaches from the University of Arizona, University of Louisville and University of Southern California.

During the Pac-12 men’s tournament in March, Arizona assistant Emanuel “Book” Richardson met for dinner in an unnamed Las Vegas restaurant …

*************
Las Vegas Review/Journal

Karl Marx once famously proclaimed, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The NCAA corollary is, if anything, a more corrupt, “From each according to his marketability, to each according to our whim.” “Need” has nothing to do with it. In practice, the few revenue-producing sports subsidize the less-popular programs, all while funneling billions of dollars into the NCAA’s coffers. This money funds a vast bureaucratic apparatus whose chief function is to make sure that all available money goes where the NCAA wants it to go — to the NCAA and to its members schools. Their profit motive is sacred. Their greed is boundless.

… All the sad sad pieces in the local rags ’bout how the University of Louisville was lookin’ so good and then hell all hell broke loose and now look at the mess we’re in… Boo hoo! Everybody’s cryin’ for UL, for Louisville, for the state of Kentucky… Everybody’s favorite current phrase: Fall from grace…

What state of grace? The school went from being a lowly commuter campus to a jockshop. All under the larcenous eye of the ex-president — a guy the school is likely to sue in order to see if it can recover some of the funds he, er, took.

No, UD doesn’t think valedictories are quite the right tone … For a university that… Well, let’s tell everyone what you did, UL.

**********************

Short version: YOU WERE A VERY VERY BAD BOY AND THEN YOU GOT CAUGHT.

Longer version: You had a very long run as a bad boy and you made a lot of money. Your bad boy president and his cronies made a lot of money. Your bad boy basketball coach and his staff and some of his players made a lot of money. You won a lot of games by bribing the best high school players to commit to UL. You ran a house of prostitution inside one of your dorms and provided the prostitutes to sixteen year old recruits and their fathers. Bad, bad, bad. Naughty, naughty, naughty.

Still, for a long time you didn’t get caught, and your professors were silent and your trustees were silent and your students whooped at the games and your coach collected his annual seven million dollars and everything was great. And then you got caught.

That is, like bad boys everywhere, you gambled. You gambled that you wouldn’t get caught. You were Kentucky Gamblers, and this is the only valedictory you’re getting, courtesy of Merle:

… This Kentucky Gambler planned to get rich quick.

… But a gambler never seems to stop till he loses all he’s got
And with a money-hungry fever, I played on
I played till I’d lost all I’d won, I was right back where I’d started from…

We did it! We made the NBA look pure!

“There’s a reason I coach in the NBA. I never wanted to be a college coach,” [Golden State Warriors Coach Steve] Kerr said. “I don’t immerse myself in that stuff. The NBA is very pure.”

Thank you, University of Louisville, and all your great affiliated institutions.

Can they really have fired Rick Pitino?

And how many millions (buyout/defamation suit/other miscellaneous legal shit) is it going to cost them, now that much of UL’s endowment has been allegedly picked off by its last president?

*************

And the capo di tutt’i capi too????

More buyout millions.

**************

To recap: The board of trustees is about to sue the last president of the university and some of his comrades in – er – missing fundism to try to get some – er – missing funds back from them. The eyes of the world, the Justice Department, and the FBI, are upon their indescribably filthy sports program. They’ve just fired their famous basketball coach and their athletic director. They can expect humongous lawsuits from them. They can also expect various sports business deals to collapse and cost them more millions. They can expect enrollment to drop like a stone, along with attendance at basketball and football games. They’ve got some desperate nonentity in there as interim president to handle all of this.

Time for UL to apply for federal disaster aid.

****************

[Pitino’s lawyer Steven] Pence promises that [the University of Louisville] ‘won’t fire Pitino without a bare-knuckle fight’….

According to Pence, Louisville would be in a legal fight over $44 million it would owe Pitino as part of his buyout clause.

Pitino’s always baring himself. A bare-knuckle fight; a bare-ass restaurant meal…

[If you didn’t expect this outcome, you’re like people who are still] stunned to learn that a game as inherently violent as football would lead to life-altering issues among players from repeated concussions and blows to the head.

Far worse, you’re like Louisville’s superscummy basketball coach, who says he’s “completely shocked” by the shocking corruption in university basketball. As completely shocked as he was by the whorehouse being run in a dorm lived in by basketball players and visited by recruits and their families.

******************

So here’s UD‘s take. American university students are being trained to be Italians. Italians are living the good life and they don’t give a rat’s ass that their entire world is howlingly corrupt. In a New Yorker article about the sordid Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, Adam Gopnik noted French anxiety about

what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor …

The University of Louisville is the avant-garde: Can you grow a university whose students heartily endorse, and fork all their tuition money over to, Rick Berlusconi Strauss-Kahn Pitino? His sextortion, his whores for sixteen year old recruits and their fathers, his stuffed envelopes for sports agents in Las Vegas hotel rooms? Can you guarantee a university whose students will rush to the bookstore and buy out Pitino’s many books about how to be ethical?

The entire financial foundation of the University of Louisville rests on a bet that there’s no bottom – that students and alumni will be able — FOREVER — to look at a guy who could give Jerry Sandusky a run for his money and say WE LOVE YOU RICK. TELL US HOW MUCH MORE YOU WANT US TO COUGH UP FOR YOUR SALARY.

It’s a solid bet. This is Kentucky, after all.

Why weren’t any head coaches implicated [in today’s university bribery scandal]? Christian Dawkins, who was working to start his own sports-management company, may have provided the beginnings of an answer in a wiretapped phone call: He said the best way to reach players was through assistant coaches because “the head coach … ain’t willing to [take bribes] ’cause they’re making too much money.“

This blog is ambivalent about the predictable call for the University of Louisville to get the death penalty (it’d probably be curtains for the whole university, since without its sports programs …), now that its totally stinky irredeemable stinkiness (there’s a reason they call it the U of Smell) has yet again wafted its way across the landscape of this great country of ours. When it comes to Louisville, it’s very much as George immortally put it to Martha: There isn’t an abomination award going that you haven’t won. The only thing left for that university to win is the death penalty.

One observer claims that the career of UL’s super-louche basketball coach will “almost certainly … end in a fall of Shakespearian dimension.” (That should be Shakespearean.). But if you start in the gutter and end in the gutter does that count as Shakespearean? Tragic?

And why are we here at University Diaries ambivalent? Because without the sex drugs and rock and roll we get from UL we’d suffer a fall of Shakespearean dimension.

… on the big ongoing – and apparently expanding – university corruption story.

Okay, so it’s unnamed so far, so… uh… so… (thinking quick here!)… So here’s the description of U6:

University 6 is described as a public research university in Kentucky with an enrollment of 22,640. The University of Louisville is Kentucky’s only school that matches that description.

Here’s our play, guys. Listen up.

You’re getting hundreds of millions from Adidas in a sponsorship deal… In fact, you are

the highest-earning school in Adidas’ college portfolio.

Adidas sure don’t give a shit about that whole whormitory thing! Anyway.

Now, assuming the deal still goes through even though the FBI just arrested their head of global sports marketing, you take that money and with it you establish an entirely new public research university in Kentucky whose enrollment happens to be 22,640. This is an online university, of course… It’s all on paper… You recruit students (the names of students; no actual classes will ever be offered) the way many other online universities do… Hanging out at homeless shelters and offering bribes…

So anyway – this way you protect the U of L…

UD wondered why the U of Smell wasn’t one of the four schools charged by the US government in the current bribery scandal. But hold onto your basketball players’ university-provided whorehouse!

[In the case of the so-far-unnamed] “University 6” … the indictment accuses four people… of funneling approximately $100,000 to an All-America high school basketball player in order to secure that player’s commitment to the school. The player was then to sign with adidas upon entering a professional basketball league.

CBS Sports college basketball reporter Gary Parrish believes that player is Class of 2017 Louisville commit Brian Bowen.

According to a report by Louisville-based TV network WDRB, the money was wired to third-party consultants who then made cash payments to the player’s family in order to conceal the transaction from university officials.

Louisville gets extra points for having allegedly transacted this business even though it was already under probation for running a whorehouse.

Louisville received its punishment from the NCAA 6/11. A bball assistant was in a hotel room in Vegas w/Adidas conspiring to cheat on 7/27.

UL does not miss a beat. More details:

The indictments also indicate that Bowen was not the only player recruited by Louisville in this manner. WDRB.com reported that the FBI recorded a meeting in Las Vegas involving a Louisville coach recruiting a high school player in the Class of 2019.

In the meeting, one of the participants noted that the school was already on probation with the NCAA and would have to be “particularly careful” about how the money was passed to the high school player and his family. The coach agreed, saying, “we gotta be very low key,” according to the indictments.

UD keeps thinking this school can’t go any lower. Then it goes lower.

(Watch it here.)

Lamont Evans, associate head coach for the Oklahoma State Cowboys, Chuck Person, associate head coach for the Auburn University Tigers, Emanuel “Book” Richardson, assistant coach for the Arizona Wildcats, and Anthony “Tony” Bland, assistant head coach of the University of Southern California Trojans, were all named in the complaint.

How did “Book” get his nickname?

Arizona assistant coach Emanuel Richardson was nicknamed Pocketbook by his grandmother because she would catch him riffling through her purse. The name was eventually shortened on the basketball courts…

Whooda thunkit. This country’s institutions of higher education host criminal gangs getting rich off of their students!

Haha I mean our universities pay criminal gangs to get rich off of their students, as in the latest FBI raid of … Oh let’s see… If you were going to guess what name would be first on the massive university athletics corruption hit parade, what would it be?

Well, if you’ve been reading this blog for more than ten minutes, you’d be choosing between Baylor and Auburn… Auburn and Baylor… Yeah, let’s start with the A‘s… Let’s go with that glorious public university in the state of Alabam’… Ruled for decades by King Bobby Lowder, it is now the fiefdom of – among other sporty types – basketball coach Chuck Person, currently

facing six charges, including bribery conspiracy, solicitation of bribes and gratuities, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and travel act conspiracy, according to court documents.

Oh, but it’s so much bigger than one Person. Tune in today at noon for an update on America’s amazing big time university athletics programs.

***********
UD thanks dmf.

Of course in principle no one here at University Diaries cares about professional football and its increasingly empty stadiums; we’re interested in how college football destroys American higher education. But as California goes, so goes the campus – though in fact things are far worse on campus… We have so many schools, and so few students give a shit about the game…

A writer at The Big Lead, one of many sports pundits now specializing in The Theory of Nothing, explains:

[W]hen fans aren’t at games it has a detrimental impact on the product. It sends the message that games are boring, uninteresting and that people don’t want to have anything to do with them in person.

UD Says: Not boring. That’s not the problem. The problem is that amateur and professional American football is disturbing.

Put aside the parking and the expense and protecting your kids from squads of the obscene shitfaced. Instead try a close phenomenological account of what it’s like, moment by moment, Being There. Start with the stadium-length Godzillatron, shrieking gargantuan nonstop ads at you. Should the ads stop, they will be replaced by gargantuan images of men getting their heads bashed in. You can’t not look – your entire field of vision has been captured. The only place to look away is the field, where actual men in real time are getting their heads bashed in. As one after another goes tottering unsteadily off the field, the names Aaron Hernandez and Junior Seau etc. unavoidably go through your head, and you start worrying about the guys still on the field getting their heads bashed in. I mean, okay – boxing, NASCAR, yes, fine, I like to watch guys get hammered… But… is it fine? What exactly am I watching here?…

And now, instead of screaming and having fun like everyone else, you’re suddenly effing Epictetus or something, and all you want is to go home and go to sleep.

… at a better time.