Louisville Basketball Prostitution/Recruiting Scandal
 

Discuss.

Lots of thoughts on this...

I know Pitino is denying he knew anything. I haven't decided which is worse. He knew it and he's lying or he really didn't know that his own program and people associated it with it are basically running a brothel for recruits. Both are horrible.

The homer in me then thinks back to USC and Reggie Bush. Someone associated with the program helps buy Bush's parents a house (and other benefits). That brings (what was it) a five year ban, reduced scholarships, etc... NCAA rules aside, buying a house is at least legal. We're talking prostitution here. I mean at this point, if Pitino or Louisville get out of this in any way lightly, just give up on having any recruiting rules at this point.

Same here. Lots of different angles here. Busy morning. Just wanted to start the thread. Will post on my many thoughts later.

I saw something yesterday that there's a new NCAA rule where "the coach didn't know" isn't supposed to matter anymore.

Here's my question: McGee was a graduate assistant at the time. I don't know about basketball, but I know in football those guys get paid peanuts. I think it can even be as low as $25K depending on tenure. Do we know how much he was making? $10K in cash seems like it would be a big number for him, and that's before the extra payments for the actual sex. If he was getting that money from someone else, that's where you start building the case.

I guess I'm not understanding why this is bigger than it is - because it was published in a book? I mean, when I was at Carolina, there was one highly rated hoops recruit - Jeff Lebo in early 1985. I know that he was, ahem, entertained by a couple of young ladies for one of them was a friend of a good friend. She was not a prostitute, in the strict sense but it was implied that this was standard practice. Have things changed in 30 years?

I know quite a few people within the Mizzou basketball and football program. Not a single one of them believes that Pitino didn't know. There's just no way he didn't know. The coaches that run these programs are all heavy micro-managers and literally know everything about the kids and their program.

We're not talking about a party off campus where a couple players had some hookers dance at a party. We're talking about an organized effort by an assistant coach where thousands of dollars were exchanged. He may have tried to put himself in a position of plausible deniability when they organized it, but he knew.

The internet and the profit that comes from moral outrage?

Yes I know I am a Hurricane fan and so my NCAA moral compass is judged to be a bit off ;) but I don't think this was a big deal for anyone until the madam decided to write the book.


We all know it goes on. We all accept that it goes on. We just don't want to hear about it going on.

Bullshit. I wanna hear every word. Perhaps an audio book even.

Ahh another person whose moral compass is off;)

Maybe I've become old man, moral compass is off guy, but yea... selling poon to get a guy to play for you is morally disgusting to me and the fact that I can't solve it doesn't mean I accept it.

That'd be a great book title.

I don't know if "old man" should come into play. I mean, this has been around a loooong time. I first heard stories -- with some level of detail -- as far back as 1979. The {cough} "young lady" {cough} allegedly involved was local to my hometown so there wasn't much that was exactly surprising (she'd been known to work as cheaply as a bottle of tequila, so straight cash was an upgrade). Never much said about it though since the beneficiary was {cough} a certain university that was extremely popular in my neck of the woods.

Louisville seems to have been on a larger scale but that's about all that's different here as far as I can tell.

To act like this is something that only Louisville is doing is rather naive. It's akin to the steroid issue afaic. Everybody on the inside knows the game, everyone on the outside doesn't care until it's brought to the forefront and then the social justice campaigns begin. If you don't think a majority of colleges have pay/lay to play arrangements then I've got a nice bridge in Brooklyn to sell ya.

I was thinking Vince Gilligan could do something with it :)

Like those above, I have a myriad of (sometimes conflicting) thoughts.

Instead of building a solid organized, cohesive argument I'm just going to free form them.

- I think before we even begin the discussion it has to begin from a few given platforms. Most importantly that anyone who is most outraged by the fact that kids are having pre-marital sex or are using that as a major besmirch of character probably is ill equipped to handle the truth of major college athletics.
- When you hear of a recruit say he wants to use all his official visits that is essentially pig latin for "drink underage without fear of getting caught, smoke weed provided by someone else and enjoy strange from a few places" I'd wager 80+% of the time.
- Most times the young ladies are as much to blame as the boys as they get star struck and become groupies of potential athletes.
- Every. School. In. The. Country. uses sex to sell their campus to elite prospects. Yes yours does. Your HC might not condone it. He might even threaten to fire anyone who knowingly condones it. But someone within your program uses sex to sell their program. HOWEVER there is a HUGE difference between "Boys ole Ben here comes from a small town in the sticks. He has never seen a strip club. He might enjoy a new experience." or even "Coed Host Jessica, Ben here is a farm boy from a small town, but a great ball player. He is going to be very, very rich one day. If you make sure he has a good time on this visit it might spark something that lasts for years or even forever." and "We need to sign Ben hire strippers and hookers and put them up in the Holiday Inn on North St."
- Frankly "I didn't know it was happening" is a horrible excuse. It is your job to know. I actually think if one of his assistants did this and he didnt know, that is actually a harsher condemnation of the job he does than if he personally sanctioned it.

This is why there is a new trend in college football recruiting for HC to have prize recruits to their house. Coaches work a ton. They want to see their family. They need to impress and supervise the recruits. What better solution than to build a game room at your house and host recruiting events there. If it also happens to promote a "family atmosphere" and makes parents push their kids to you all the better.

that is about half my thoughts but work calls.

Recruiting hostesses being very friendly with recruits happens everywhere, I'm sure. Actually paying a madame to organize a party involving actual prostitutes to bang these players, I don't think that happens everywhere.

The idea of student-athletes getting any kind of benefits is horrible, absolutely horrible.


/sarcasm

No one should be surprised that every major college basketball program does this except Duke. They don't need to do it.

The funny part is that people are up in arms about the NCAA violation aspect of it more than anything. I personally don't see that much of a difference and would probably say that all things considered, it's better to leave this kind of thing to the professionals than to impress upon a group of coeds that their primary value to the university is to attempt to seduce football/basketball recruits.

Which brings up the question... which is worse?

Yeah, that's where I was going as well.

Yep, pretty much.

Somehow I think it might actually be a bit less ... unseemly if an assistant coach is doing it rather than someone that's more administrative.

(Not sure what title is most common for "Director of Hostess Program" but that's the gist of what I'm thinking of)

Only problem with cracking down on recruiting hostesses is that if they weren't actually part of the AD, they'd be very likely to be lining up to bang these players on their own anyway. At least that's how it was when I was in school.

I've probably told this story before...my freshman year I lived a few doors down from a basketball player who had a girl doing his work for him in exchange for sex. As in..."please, I will do your homework for you if you let me blow you." And this was for a mid level 3* recruit.

I hope that's a feature in TCY2

Right, so why should a school spend money on giving it this creepy official facade?

It doesn't seem to have changed much from what I'm aware of locally.

It's not much tougher than picking shirts off a rack, they're virtually lined up & you just pick the one you want. If an athlete isn't getting laid regularly it's not for the lack of opportunity.

It seems like the story is about the recruiting violation and the fact that it involved an illegal activity.

I don't know why "hostesses" are brought into this story unless they are being paid to have sex or forced into it. They are adults and can choose to have consensual sex with who they please. If that's a big recruit that they want to impress, so be it. As long as the school isn't forcing or paying for it, hostesses are not a problem.

Well hostesses are paid by the AD.

If that matters at all.

After scandals at Colorado (and Arizona State, and Tennessee, and Oregon) made headlines back in 2004, the NCAA tightened up the rules on hostess programs. There's plenty of recruiting violations to connect to them, same as paying strippers outright.

And actually, the sex itself -- consensual, organic, spontaneous, whatever -- CAN be an NCAA violation.

An article from The Atlantic a couple years back explains it as well as any. In it, the NCAA refers to bylaw 13.6.1 with regard to whether hostesses can have sex with recruits. . And most universities have specific prohibitions about sex between recruits and hostesses (or official representatives), which means that the activity would be an NCAA violation.

Recruiting hosts and hostesses are on the payroll??? I don't follow other programs closely enough to have any insight on this, but I know that up until at least fairly recently (maybe 2-3 years ago,) they didn't get anything but gameday tickets at UGA.

Seems that paid/unpaid varies from school to school (back in 2009-10 Auburn was documented by Sports By Brooks as having spent over $80k paying their hostesses ... and the five token male hosts) And it varies from cash versus other compensation.

from a 2011 article in the Red & Black

Yeah...I found that article from the R&B after I made that comment. Did a little googling to make sure I wasn't crazy. :p FWIW, I've also received credible info in the last half hour or so that would indicate that GT hostesses are on the same basic arrangement as UGA.

Sounds about right. And they performed similar {cough} duties in the days prior to increased regulation & scrutiny too. I don't know if any school, at least in the southeast, didn't have a fairly similar program honestly.

Nowadays a lot of the extracurricular stuff (both benign and iffier) seems to be filtered down through the Greek system. That's how my son ended up spending a Saturday afternoon playing paintball with a 4* recruit a few years back (he was here on an unofficial during a non-game weekend).

It's not all that unusual for me to hear about Recruit X was at such-and-such party. That's kind of gray area to me, if it's an unofficial visit and no bonafide representatives of the university or athletic department are involved then I'm not sure how or even if it should be policed. I mean, my decidedly NOT an athletic prospect HS senior has invitations lined up for a good bit of spring to various parties at multiple schools, basically part of the fraternity "pre-rush" traditions. If he's got that kind of opportunity then I can't imagine the same wouldn't exist for a lot of legit D1 prospects.

When college visits go awry.

I'm not saying they should do anything. But if it's banned entirely, it will just pop up in some other unofficial form.

Louisville is likely guilty.. Pitino likely knew of something of this nature going on.. but not exactly what (back to plausible deniability)

What is being lost however.. is how do they consider this "woman" to be credible.. she pimped out her own daughters for christ sakes.. one of which she misrepresented as being of age..

Forgetting about all the documentation that she allegedly has, it's probably because she is willing to tell the truth about pimping her daughters. If she is going to tell the truth about that, it is not too hard to believe that teenage boys would be willing to take the opportunity to have sex with them is pretty believable. Since it was brought up earlier, it is akin to Jose Canseco and steroids in baseball.

Well, that's one of the many angles, and why this story blew up after the OTL piece. Katina Powell is......wow. Let's just say that from all I've seen so far, she'd make my boy J.R. Ewing blush. ;) She was a low-grade madame who was low-down enough to pimp her own daughters, but it also seems fairly obvious at this point that she had the street smarts from day one to realize that this could turn into a nice payday. Mainly because of the (apparently accurate) details she kept in the journal, it's no longer her credibility alone. She was able to put specific dates of specific trysts in her book. In multiple instances, ESPN was able to match those dates to receipts, cell phone records, etc.

For one example, watch this part of the Outside The Lines piece from around 7:55 to 10:15: LOUISVILLE BASKETBALL PLAYERS PAID ESCORT AND HER DAUGHTERS TO SLEEP WITH TEAM IN 2010-2014 - YouTube

Oh yeah, and according to ESPN, *five* former players/recruits from Louisville have confirmed some of her stories. In short, this is nowhere near "the word of a madame who pimped out her own daughters" anymore. There's a pretty big smoking gun here.

Maybe I'm giving too much credit to Louisville on this one, but my guess is that the cash wasn't flowing through the University at all, but that it was coming directly from a booster. McGee was a starter there only a couple of years or so before all of this started, so he knew the lay of the land, and boosters knew him.

I've heard from pretty good sources, that despite denying anything to do with it that the player Pitino kicked off the team last year, or the year before (can't remember), Chane Behanon is blowing the whistle on the whole thing. He's evidently pretty heavily involved with one of the daughters.

When Pitino first came to KY, I was a local athlete of the week as a senior in high school. He came and spoke at our end of the year banquet. I idolized the guy, bought and read his books, followed KY basketball religiously, etc. As I've gotten older and wiser, and the stuff has gotten shadier (or come to light), I just can't even stomach any form of college athletics anymore. It's beyond ridiculous.

I'm not reading him as denying involvement. I'm reading him as denying Pitino's involvement:

Ex-Louisville Forward Chane Behanan Weighs In On Alleged Sex Scandal | College Spun

Dola:

Actually that also reads like "well yeah, I did 'em, but I didn't come to Louisville just because I did 'em!"

fucking college student writing skills :mad:

Thank you. I noticed that as well.

Who are these guardians that escorted the recruits on their visits and also got to engage in the festivities?

That's the part that's crazy to me.

I would assume that some were leech AAU coaches and some others were former deadbeat dads who--once it became apparent that NBA dollars were a real possibility--saw the light, suddenly realizing how much they loved their sons that they had previously neglected.

How could you knot notice?

Edit: Inspired by SteveMax58. ;)

Me two