T.J. Gassnola is the president and head of the board of trustees of the University of Kansas. He is the face of the school. The front porch of the school.
T.J. runs basketball at KU, and basketball is just about all you’re ever going to read about when it comes to KU.
More specifically, he runs KU’s players. T.J. is in charge of giving them and their families huge wads of cash under the table at Las Vegas hotels to play at KU. T.J. keeps KU all basketball all the time. He is KU’s VIP, MVP, and HRH all rolled into one.
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Everyone knows there’s nothing wrong with outfits like Adidas – for whom T.J. also works – giving money to future basketball greats. This wise investment often starts well before these players launch their adventures in university education… well before they decide to take advantage of the intellectual resources of places like Lawrence.
KU enjoys an extremely lucrative business relationship with Adidas.
Marc Emmert’s multimillion dollar NCAA salary is predicated on his absolute indifference to the transformation of once-respectable American universities into stinky petty hilarious crime gutters, places run by people like T.J. Gassnola.
So. All good. Everyone gets rich: The player, his family, Marc Emmert, the University of Kansas, and ol’ T.J.
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So… FUCK the FBI. What the fuck? It sashays in like it’s king of the world, drags T.J. into court and makes him sing in exchange for reduced prison time for the many many naughty things T.J. has been up to … Worse yet, it makes KU and Emmert scrunch up their features, take a deep breath, and blow out the very best horseshit they can come up with about how shocked and disappointed and eager to be helpful they are…
UD‘s only sorry this woman is no longer KU’s chancellor – she came to KU after running Chapel Hill into the ground cuz of their athletic scandal, remember? She’s just the sort of person you want running a basketball factory, and she’s still getting paid too.
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We had a nice tidy world here, see. Emmert and the whole “university” thing at KU did the work of shedding respectability-light upon the scheme so no one would think anything dark and criminal was going on. The players and the corporate suits and the coaches pocketed the money and kept their mouths shut. But now T.J.’s talking, and it’s… well, it’s Kafka, kiddies.
The most absurd moment of a most absurd day at the federal fraud case featuring one of college basketball’s most absurd characters had to be the following … well, actually, there are many contenders.
Maybe it was when Billy Preston wrecked his Dodge Charger on the campus of the University of Kansas. The fact a top incoming basketball recruit was driving such a car caused concern with the KU compliance office, which investigated who owned the vehicle.
Text messages later revealed Preston’s mother Nicole Player bragging about buying the car for her son, but … the car was … registered with “Nicole Player’s recently deceased grandmother” who lived in Florida.
KU was fine with this explanation. Who wouldn’t be?
[I]n the process of looking into the car, KU discovered a wire transfer to Player that came from a man named T.J. Gassnola. Player lived in Euless, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Gassnola hailed from Ludlow, Massachusetts, a little town a couple hours west of Boston.
There appeared to be no good reason for this exchange – and there wasn’t, at least by NCAA standards. Gassnola, a member of Adidas’ so-called “Black Ops” group and AAU team owner, detailed from the witness stand how he had plied Player with $89,000 over the course of nearly a year, including a $30,000 cash payout in a New York hotel room and another $20,000 brick delivered while in Las Vegas.
But wait, that’s not the best part.
Worried there was no proper explanation for the payments, Player texted Gassnola to inform him she had told KU officials the two had been involved in an “intimate” relationship, believing such activity would somehow make it NCAA legal.
If you can’t get enough of this stuff – and there’s TONS – go here.
Better yet, go here. This narrative, penned by Kafka after he dropped acid, is truly one of the greats.