OHSportsFan
Fan of Ohio Sports in Indy
They’ll just lawyer up and stall and nothing will happen.
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ScriptOhio
Everybody is somebody else's weirdo.
Kansas Did Nothing to Stop Adidas's T.J. Gassnola, and That's Why It's in This Mess
With the tacit welcome of Bill Self, Gassnola was allowed to break rules to help the program, and now the chickens have come home to roost.
David Reed, whose job at Kansas is NCAA rules compliance, compared T.J. Gassnola to infamous 20th century mobster Lucky Luciano.
Reed described him thusly to NCAA investigators: “He’s a parasite taking advantage of kids and riding their coattails to be a jock sniffer to power coaches and power players in the industry. … “ Reed said he asked the Kansas ticket manager, Scott Hahn, about Gassnola and was told, “Just Google him, he’s a scum bag.” Google don’t lie: Reed found out Gassnola had been a runner for agent Andy Miller, had his AAU team suspended by the NCAA and had a criminal record.
Sean Lester is the deputy athletic director at Kansas, essentially the No. 2 man in the department. According to NCAA Enforcement, Lester was sufficiently concerned about Gassnola’s presence around the Jayhawks that he asked the head of Adidas North America, Mark King, outside a meeting about Gassnola’s role with the company. King told Lester that Gassnola is a consultant, and that was that.
Sheahon Zenger was the athletic director at Kansas from 2011-18. He saw Gassnola in the hallways of the school’s athletic offices, and interacted with him at coach Bill Self’s Hall of Fame induction in early September 2017—where Adidas paid $250,000 to throw a party in celebration of both Self and former Adidas client Tracy McGrady’s induction. Zenger said Lester shared his concerns about Gassnola with him, but Adidas “assured (Lester) he was on the up-and-up.”
Those are the NCAA Enforcement accounts of three Kansas senior athletic administrators regarding the bagman who came home to roost in Lawrence. They didn’t like T.J. Gassnola, didn’t trust him—and didn’t do a thing to curtail his access to Self’s program. Those accounts were all part of the NCAA’s 92-page response to the school, the final follow-up phase from its 2019 Notice of Allegations.
It is a one-sided document filed in response to Kansas’s own one-sided document, the latter of which refutes almost everything the NCAA alleges. Among the disagreements was how vigilant the school could and should have been regarding Gassnola, who became a star cooperating witness at one of the federal college basketball corruption trials and testified to paying multiple former players, including multiple Jayhawks.
But if you want to know why Kansas is facing a Level One charge for lack of institutional control and failure to monitor its men’s basketball program, the hands-off approach to Gassnola (and other Adidas reps) is your answer. It is one of five Level One allegations against the school, making this the most aggressive NOA to date from the NCAA in the wake of the federal investigation of the sport. (Auburn, which won’t publicly confirm or deny receipt of its NOA, might be sitting on a doozy as well. And we don’t yet know what might await LSU or Arizona.)
The fundamental flashpoint of debate between the NCAA and Kansas revolves around Gassnola and others on the Adidas payroll. The NCAA says Gassnola, James Gatto, Merl Code and David Cutler were representatives of Kansas’s athletics interest, and thus were boosters, working to put players in Jayhawks uniforms. The school says they weren’t boosters, just Adidas employees trying to help the company and not any particular school, and thus Kansas cannot be held accountable for the raft of rules they broke on its behalf.
It will be up to the NCAA Committee on Infractions (or possibly the new Independent Accountability Resolution Process) to rule on that. But if you can navigate through the turgid waters of NCAA parlance and definitions, the crux of the matter is this: Kansas, which once famously proclaimed its victimhood at the hands of Adidas, welcomed Gassnola into its orbit and never lifted a finger to monitor him—despite his “scum bag” status in the eyes of the administration.
Why? Because Self obviously wanted him involved. And nobody at Kansas—including his titular superiors—was going to question a national champion coach who owned the Big 12. Nobody in the Kansas administration questioned Self about Gassnola’s association with the program.
What Bill Self wanted, Bill Self got. That includes tens of millions of dollars during his Kansas tenure to date. And now it includes Level One NCAA allegations that could result in massive penalties for both the school and the coach.
Self has taken the position that Gassnola was basically just part of the AAU/sneaker circuit scenery. Someone who is around, and who his program dealt with, but not someone it relied on for help in recruiting. That’s despite the text exchanges between the two that were revealed in court and are part of the NCAA’s NOA, in which Gassnola says helping Self is his top priority. (That’s after Self texts Gassnola that they “just got to get some real guys.”)
Entire article: https://www.si.com/college/2020/05/08/kansas-basketball-scandal-bill-self-tj-gassnola
With the tacit welcome of Bill Self, Gassnola was allowed to break rules to help the program, and now the chickens have come home to roost.
David Reed, whose job at Kansas is NCAA rules compliance, compared T.J. Gassnola to infamous 20th century mobster Lucky Luciano.
Reed described him thusly to NCAA investigators: “He’s a parasite taking advantage of kids and riding their coattails to be a jock sniffer to power coaches and power players in the industry. … “ Reed said he asked the Kansas ticket manager, Scott Hahn, about Gassnola and was told, “Just Google him, he’s a scum bag.” Google don’t lie: Reed found out Gassnola had been a runner for agent Andy Miller, had his AAU team suspended by the NCAA and had a criminal record.
Sean Lester is the deputy athletic director at Kansas, essentially the No. 2 man in the department. According to NCAA Enforcement, Lester was sufficiently concerned about Gassnola’s presence around the Jayhawks that he asked the head of Adidas North America, Mark King, outside a meeting about Gassnola’s role with the company. King told Lester that Gassnola is a consultant, and that was that.
Sheahon Zenger was the athletic director at Kansas from 2011-18. He saw Gassnola in the hallways of the school’s athletic offices, and interacted with him at coach Bill Self’s Hall of Fame induction in early September 2017—where Adidas paid $250,000 to throw a party in celebration of both Self and former Adidas client Tracy McGrady’s induction. Zenger said Lester shared his concerns about Gassnola with him, but Adidas “assured (Lester) he was on the up-and-up.”
Those are the NCAA Enforcement accounts of three Kansas senior athletic administrators regarding the bagman who came home to roost in Lawrence. They didn’t like T.J. Gassnola, didn’t trust him—and didn’t do a thing to curtail his access to Self’s program. Those accounts were all part of the NCAA’s 92-page response to the school, the final follow-up phase from its 2019 Notice of Allegations.
It is a one-sided document filed in response to Kansas’s own one-sided document, the latter of which refutes almost everything the NCAA alleges. Among the disagreements was how vigilant the school could and should have been regarding Gassnola, who became a star cooperating witness at one of the federal college basketball corruption trials and testified to paying multiple former players, including multiple Jayhawks.
But if you want to know why Kansas is facing a Level One charge for lack of institutional control and failure to monitor its men’s basketball program, the hands-off approach to Gassnola (and other Adidas reps) is your answer. It is one of five Level One allegations against the school, making this the most aggressive NOA to date from the NCAA in the wake of the federal investigation of the sport. (Auburn, which won’t publicly confirm or deny receipt of its NOA, might be sitting on a doozy as well. And we don’t yet know what might await LSU or Arizona.)
The fundamental flashpoint of debate between the NCAA and Kansas revolves around Gassnola and others on the Adidas payroll. The NCAA says Gassnola, James Gatto, Merl Code and David Cutler were representatives of Kansas’s athletics interest, and thus were boosters, working to put players in Jayhawks uniforms. The school says they weren’t boosters, just Adidas employees trying to help the company and not any particular school, and thus Kansas cannot be held accountable for the raft of rules they broke on its behalf.
It will be up to the NCAA Committee on Infractions (or possibly the new Independent Accountability Resolution Process) to rule on that. But if you can navigate through the turgid waters of NCAA parlance and definitions, the crux of the matter is this: Kansas, which once famously proclaimed its victimhood at the hands of Adidas, welcomed Gassnola into its orbit and never lifted a finger to monitor him—despite his “scum bag” status in the eyes of the administration.
Why? Because Self obviously wanted him involved. And nobody at Kansas—including his titular superiors—was going to question a national champion coach who owned the Big 12. Nobody in the Kansas administration questioned Self about Gassnola’s association with the program.
What Bill Self wanted, Bill Self got. That includes tens of millions of dollars during his Kansas tenure to date. And now it includes Level One NCAA allegations that could result in massive penalties for both the school and the coach.
Self has taken the position that Gassnola was basically just part of the AAU/sneaker circuit scenery. Someone who is around, and who his program dealt with, but not someone it relied on for help in recruiting. That’s despite the text exchanges between the two that were revealed in court and are part of the NCAA’s NOA, in which Gassnola says helping Self is his top priority. (That’s after Self texts Gassnola that they “just got to get some real guys.”)
Entire article: https://www.si.com/college/2020/05/08/kansas-basketball-scandal-bill-self-tj-gassnola
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OHSportsFan
Fan of Ohio Sports in Indy
So unfair to Duke! All these kids turn down a lot of money to play at this squeaky clean program!
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ScriptOhio
Everybody is somebody else's weirdo.
Oklahoma State given 1-year NCAA tournament ban, will appeal
The NCAA Committee on Infractions on Friday placed Oklahoma State's men's basketball program on three years of probation and banned the Cowboys from playing in postseason tournaments next season.
The penalties are the result of a Level I violation involving former associate head coach Lamont Evans, who was sentenced in June 2019 to three months in prison for accepting between $18,150 and $22,000 in bribes to steer players from South Carolina and Oklahoma State to certain agents and financial advisers.
The NCAA also hit Evans with a 10-year show-cause penalty. During that period, any NCAA member school employing him must restrict him from any athletically related duties unless it shows cause why the restrictions should not apply.
Entire article: https://www.espn.com/mens-college-b...lahoma-state-given-1-year-ncaa-tournament-ban
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NCAA really making a huge statement nailing Oklahoma State
while the higher profile programs still roam free.
The statement of course being "If you arent one of the elite, dont get caught cheating"
while the higher profile programs still roam free.
The statement of course being "If you arent one of the elite, dont get caught cheating"
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