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Brian Bowen Sr. posed it Thursday on Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma State, Creighton and a few others. The money that Bowen Sr. claims to have offered for his son's basketball services ranged from $ 150,000 to $ 100,000 to $ 50,000. And if you did not know who Bowen Sr. was before appearing in a US district court, let's just call him the guy who finally killed amateurism.
What Bowen Sr. did not do, is completely kill – or eliminate – the Oregon Ducks. A financial offer may have been awarded to his son who frequented Oregon. Bowen testified that he did not remember having talked about the details. He will be cross-examined next week and called a liar by the defense.
What was clear after unveiling the simulacrum of university athletics is that you can get a great recruiting course these days for about $ 500,000. And building an unbeatable AAU team will only cost about a fifth of that.
Amateurism died at the bar Thursday in Manhattan. It's been awhile since he's alive. Perhaps NCAA President Mark Emmert did not attend the trial because he does not like to see his friends die. But what should happen next is that university athletics must stay awake and go out and declare that it will do what the runners of the game already do: pay the players. Either that, or eliminate athletes a little tired, ridding the system of those who have been trained to use it.
Adidas is guilty. Just like Nike and Under Armor. No one is more duped into thinking that sports shoe makers are looking for nothing more than channeling the best possible talent to their affiliate college programs. It starts in youth basketball, star camps, AAU teams, some tournaments, all paid by sneaker companies. By the time the players are old enough to go to college, none of us should be surprised that they arrive with their hands.
The contract between Adidas and Louisville is $ 160 million. Nike's contract with Oregon amounts to $ 88 million. University athletics is a $ 1 billion business. Amateurism, developed by the NCAA regulations in 1906, is an archaic and absurd concept when confronted with the reality of the new world.
Merl Code, one of the former Adidas employees on trial, said: "Nike schools are also paying off.It is a corrupt space.Cheat, it's cheating."
All of Adidas' defense rests on the idea that everyone is corrupt. The fact that he was caught channeling $ 100,000 to a recruit's family was a violation of the NCAA, but also a waste of time for the federal government involved in regulation.
Nobody is also surprised by the testimony. Frankly, I have a hard time pretending to be indignant. The system we have set a market price of $ 100,000 for the first rookie (what Brian Bowen Jr. received for his commitment to Louisville and what Bowen Sr. claims to have obtained from Billy Preston for going to Kansas) . The same system also allowed coach Rick Pitino to get a bonus of $ 1.6 million from Adidas last year. It also allows the NCAA to sell the broadcast rights of the post-season tournament for a billion dollars a year in a contract ending in 2032.
This is not the amateur athletics. It's a professional game running under the pretense of amateurism. Hearing a rookie's parent talk so openly about the auction on his son just highlights it.
The defense attorney, Casey Donnelly, said in his opening statement that "Oregon, a Nike school, has offered (Bowen) an astronomical amount of money when it went to in Oregon ".
Thursday, when the government asked him what was the financial offer of Oregon for his son, Bowen Sr. replied, "I do not remember that."
He does not remember it. It's funny, because I do not remember when the NCAA felt innocent. It's been too long.
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