So far it’s just an anonymous allegation. And David Salinas, the investment banker with the summer league and many investment clients among university coaches, has – just after the SEC announced he was under investigation for a Ponzi scheme – killed himself.
The reason some [coaches] might be concerned about their financial connection to Salinas is because it’s unclear how the NCAA would view college coaches investing money with the founder of a summer basketball program that supplied recruits to several universities over the years.
The suggestion is that the coaches felt compelled to give Salinas hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for his recruits.
If true, it’s another glorious chapter in the annals of amateur university athletics. And it explains why these guys demand such strikingly high salaries.
One writer sums up the situation:
The SEC will investigate the alleged Ponzi scheme, local law enforcement will investigate the death, and the NCAA will investigate why in God’s Sweet Earth an AAU curator was knowingly investing money on behalf of the coaches of some of the schools that his program was funneling players to.
Essentially, this means college sports fans will have to live with yet another interminable fall-out of yet another scandal.
Well, thankfully, we have plenty of experience doing that.
July 19th, 2011 at 8:15AM
My initial reaction was “Wow–the Southeastern Conference is investigating a ponzi scheme? They’ve really beefed up their enforcement.”
Oh. Not that SEC.