The University of Louisville, located in Louisville, Kentucky, is a city-owned, public university which has:
- Total of 22,300 students
- Endowment of $877M
- School budget of $1.2B
- In 2013 UL Athletics had $96M in revenue but spent $92M
- Head Basketball Coach Rick Pitino's yearly salary is $5M for the next 10 years
A self-described former madam and escort, Katina Powell, rocked the collegiate basketball world with her new book, "Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen," that describes up to two dozen stripper and sex parties from 2010 to 2014 in a dorm room on campus for recruits and current players to engage in paid sexual acts. Who paid Katina Powell and her "colleagues"? Andre McGee, Louisville's former graduate assistant coach, paid the "dancer" who would then go ahead and have sex with former players, recruits, and their guardians who accompanied them on visits. All of this under the leadership and direction of the $5M a year Head Coach Rick Pitino, who claims he was unaware any of this was happening. You can read the full story here.
Where should we begin? The NCAA, University of Louisville, the coaching staff, or Katina Powell? There are numerous perspectives, a lot of responsibility, and plenty of blame to go around. Wait, what about the collegiate recruiting process?
Katina Powell, who actually employed her two daughters, Lindsay and Rod Ni, as part of the sex parties, decided to write a book because "I knew that this day would come, and I knew that one day they would say, 'She's lying.'" Ms. Powell kept phone records, texts, and detailed journals of the events because she did not want to be called a liar one day! At no point did Ms. Powell know that the NCAA tournament is only second to the NFL in postseason ad revenue in which the NCAA brings in billions over a span of six weeks. Also, Ms. Powell did not know that any sort of sex scandal involving high school basketball recruits and collegiate basketball players published in a tell-all book would be the first of its kind and could potentially be worth millions which makes exposing her own children worth it!
For those without kids or if you have children that do not play a sport, you maybe unaware of the recruiting process. Most, if not all, collegiate sports recruit players from high school to attend and play at their respective schools. Recruiting for football and basketball has greater stakes than say volleyball because the arena, Papa John's Stadium, the Louisville Cardinals football team plays in, holds 55,000 spectators; the arena, KFC Yum! Center, the arena the basketball team plays in, holds 22,000 spectators. These two stadiums gross over a million dollars in revenue per game but spectators are only going to buy tickets if the teams are worth watching. Well, how do coaches at the college level put together a team that is worth the price of admission? They have to recruit good players!
This is where it becomes very complicated and competitive. The price tag of a college education is at astronomical levels to the point you have to be Donald Trump to afford a 4-year institution for one child! If you do not have the financial means, you are relying on scholarships, academic or athletic, to get your child into school. The most visible athletic scholarships are for football and basketball. Parents are now pushing, almost shoving, their child into these sports and doing whatever they can to make sure their child is recruited. Side note, this has given rise to power of AAU but that is for another blog.
So now you have competitive parents doing whatever they can to get their child recruited to play a sport at the next level while obtaining their education for free, coupled with the coaches of these collegiate teams looking for the best talent. A collision course that has resulted in what has happened at Louisville.
Let's pretend you are the mother of Lebron James, a senior in high school, #1 in his class and the most sought after recruit by every university in the United States. Lebron is being visited by every college basketball coach and is being invited to visit their schools over a weekend in what is referred to as an official recruiting visit. The NCAA stipulates that a recruitable high school student can only make five official visits, therefore, Lebron has to officially announce his top five schools. Let's just say those five schools are Ohio State, Duke, UNC, UCLA, and Kentucky. Lebron has to pick 5 different weekends to visit these five schools. On these visits, the coaching staffs for each school has to somehow sell Lebron on why he should attend their respective school. How can these coaches accomplish this hard sell? What will differentiate each school from each other? The NCAA has created rules for what can be done on these visits but the NCAA also lacks the manpower and resources to monitor each and every collegiate recruiting visit by the thousands of recruitable students that do this year in and year out.
At this point, the coach and his staff will do whatever possible to sell Lebron and his guardian (whether a parent or otherwise) on why he should attend said school. Ohio State may give Lebron a bag of money, or a "bag" as it is commonly referred to. It has been rumored that schools have given over $100K for a recruit, maybe more. Duke may elect to buy Lebron a car, UNC may elect to buy his mother a house, UCLA may elect to give his mother a new job and Kentucky may do all of the above and supply sex! How is a guy like Lebron to choose? Here in lies the rub!
How did we get to this point? The coaching staff, in particular the head coach, is under tremendous amount of pressure to win and get to the NCAA tournament. Every team that goes to the tournament can receive, at minimum, $1.6 million. If the coach does not win, game revenue decreases and alumni support waivers. If the alumni stop writing checks, the athletic director is now under pressure because the president of the university is now breathing down his neck because the university endowment is shrinking, applications are down, research money has been reduced, and now the university has to start firing people because of shrunken budgets. The domino effect here is tremendous and it all starts with the recruitment of a kid named Lebron. The future employment of pretty much everyone at the university depends on the recruitment of great players that can lead to the football and basketball teams winning. Talking about pressure!
Jalen Rose, member of the famed Fab Five, who went thru the recruiting process over 25 years ago said, "If I'm not getting laid, I'm not coming". You can read more about his story here. Is it inconceivable to believe the young men today who are being recruited today are not saying the same thing? Do we actually believe that college coaches are not doing whatever they have to in order to appease the best recruits and get them to sign on the dotted line? And are we too naive to realize that everybody in the power structure, including college presidents and the NCAA, do not know this is going on but turn the other cheek until a Katina Powell comes along?
If you were in Lebron's shoes, hypothetically, and you are 17 years old, would you turn down sex? Money? A new job for your mother? A new car? A new career for mom? On a college campus, outside of attending class, having sex is something just about every collegiate student is doing. But now we are taking the oldest profession, prostitution, and using it to attract great athletes to institutions of higher learning.
This problem is bigger than Katina Powell, who, in my opinion, is merely taking financial advantage of an industry that operates around money. The problem cannot be the recruitable athlete and his parents because all they want to do is play basketball and go to college and would not be able to otherwise because of the high costs of a college education. Do we blame the head coach, the man whose career is in the hands of 18 to 22 year olds and their ability to win games and bring in revenue for the university? How about the athletic directors and collegiate presidents who are in the business of bringing in money and have figured out the biggest money makers lie in collegiate sports, in particular, football and basketball? If we cannot blame any of those people, the NCAA is the one without a seat when the music stops.
A billion dollar a year operation, that does not pay taxes, could potentially put a stop to all of this but they run the risk of not meeting their billion dollar profit quota. Here is what is going to happen:
1. Andre McGee, the man who actually conducted these sex parties, will be forced out of NCAA coaching and essentially black-balled from coaching ever again at the collegiate level.
2. Head Coach Rick Pitino, who just signed a contract extension, vowed to not resign and he will not be fired. He will claim he knew nothing and there will not be any proof that will prove otherwise. He will continue to coach and recruit at a high level with the potential to take Louisville back to the Big Dance, aka, the NCAA Tournament.
3. The athletic director and president will issue statements supporting Head Coach Rick Pitino because there is not a reason not to but they maybe willing to sanction themselves before the NCAA does.
4. The NCAA will continue to make billions but will sanction Louisville but I am guessing it will be a slap on the wrist.
At the end, this story will pass, Katina Powell will make her money and have her 15 minutes of fame but the institution of bribery, prostitution, deceit, lies, and extortion will continue through what we refer to as the recruiting process.
For those without kids or if you have children that do not play a sport, you maybe unaware of the recruiting process. Most, if not all, collegiate sports recruit players from high school to attend and play at their respective schools. Recruiting for football and basketball has greater stakes than say volleyball because the arena, Papa John's Stadium, the Louisville Cardinals football team plays in, holds 55,000 spectators; the arena, KFC Yum! Center, the arena the basketball team plays in, holds 22,000 spectators. These two stadiums gross over a million dollars in revenue per game but spectators are only going to buy tickets if the teams are worth watching. Well, how do coaches at the college level put together a team that is worth the price of admission? They have to recruit good players!
This is where it becomes very complicated and competitive. The price tag of a college education is at astronomical levels to the point you have to be Donald Trump to afford a 4-year institution for one child! If you do not have the financial means, you are relying on scholarships, academic or athletic, to get your child into school. The most visible athletic scholarships are for football and basketball. Parents are now pushing, almost shoving, their child into these sports and doing whatever they can to make sure their child is recruited. Side note, this has given rise to power of AAU but that is for another blog.
So now you have competitive parents doing whatever they can to get their child recruited to play a sport at the next level while obtaining their education for free, coupled with the coaches of these collegiate teams looking for the best talent. A collision course that has resulted in what has happened at Louisville.
Let's pretend you are the mother of Lebron James, a senior in high school, #1 in his class and the most sought after recruit by every university in the United States. Lebron is being visited by every college basketball coach and is being invited to visit their schools over a weekend in what is referred to as an official recruiting visit. The NCAA stipulates that a recruitable high school student can only make five official visits, therefore, Lebron has to officially announce his top five schools. Let's just say those five schools are Ohio State, Duke, UNC, UCLA, and Kentucky. Lebron has to pick 5 different weekends to visit these five schools. On these visits, the coaching staffs for each school has to somehow sell Lebron on why he should attend their respective school. How can these coaches accomplish this hard sell? What will differentiate each school from each other? The NCAA has created rules for what can be done on these visits but the NCAA also lacks the manpower and resources to monitor each and every collegiate recruiting visit by the thousands of recruitable students that do this year in and year out.
At this point, the coach and his staff will do whatever possible to sell Lebron and his guardian (whether a parent or otherwise) on why he should attend said school. Ohio State may give Lebron a bag of money, or a "bag" as it is commonly referred to. It has been rumored that schools have given over $100K for a recruit, maybe more. Duke may elect to buy Lebron a car, UNC may elect to buy his mother a house, UCLA may elect to give his mother a new job and Kentucky may do all of the above and supply sex! How is a guy like Lebron to choose? Here in lies the rub!
How did we get to this point? The coaching staff, in particular the head coach, is under tremendous amount of pressure to win and get to the NCAA tournament. Every team that goes to the tournament can receive, at minimum, $1.6 million. If the coach does not win, game revenue decreases and alumni support waivers. If the alumni stop writing checks, the athletic director is now under pressure because the president of the university is now breathing down his neck because the university endowment is shrinking, applications are down, research money has been reduced, and now the university has to start firing people because of shrunken budgets. The domino effect here is tremendous and it all starts with the recruitment of a kid named Lebron. The future employment of pretty much everyone at the university depends on the recruitment of great players that can lead to the football and basketball teams winning. Talking about pressure!
Jalen Rose, member of the famed Fab Five, who went thru the recruiting process over 25 years ago said, "If I'm not getting laid, I'm not coming". You can read more about his story here. Is it inconceivable to believe the young men today who are being recruited today are not saying the same thing? Do we actually believe that college coaches are not doing whatever they have to in order to appease the best recruits and get them to sign on the dotted line? And are we too naive to realize that everybody in the power structure, including college presidents and the NCAA, do not know this is going on but turn the other cheek until a Katina Powell comes along?
If you were in Lebron's shoes, hypothetically, and you are 17 years old, would you turn down sex? Money? A new job for your mother? A new car? A new career for mom? On a college campus, outside of attending class, having sex is something just about every collegiate student is doing. But now we are taking the oldest profession, prostitution, and using it to attract great athletes to institutions of higher learning.
This problem is bigger than Katina Powell, who, in my opinion, is merely taking financial advantage of an industry that operates around money. The problem cannot be the recruitable athlete and his parents because all they want to do is play basketball and go to college and would not be able to otherwise because of the high costs of a college education. Do we blame the head coach, the man whose career is in the hands of 18 to 22 year olds and their ability to win games and bring in revenue for the university? How about the athletic directors and collegiate presidents who are in the business of bringing in money and have figured out the biggest money makers lie in collegiate sports, in particular, football and basketball? If we cannot blame any of those people, the NCAA is the one without a seat when the music stops.
A billion dollar a year operation, that does not pay taxes, could potentially put a stop to all of this but they run the risk of not meeting their billion dollar profit quota. Here is what is going to happen:
1. Andre McGee, the man who actually conducted these sex parties, will be forced out of NCAA coaching and essentially black-balled from coaching ever again at the collegiate level.
2. Head Coach Rick Pitino, who just signed a contract extension, vowed to not resign and he will not be fired. He will claim he knew nothing and there will not be any proof that will prove otherwise. He will continue to coach and recruit at a high level with the potential to take Louisville back to the Big Dance, aka, the NCAA Tournament.
3. The athletic director and president will issue statements supporting Head Coach Rick Pitino because there is not a reason not to but they maybe willing to sanction themselves before the NCAA does.
4. The NCAA will continue to make billions but will sanction Louisville but I am guessing it will be a slap on the wrist.
At the end, this story will pass, Katina Powell will make her money and have her 15 minutes of fame but the institution of bribery, prostitution, deceit, lies, and extortion will continue through what we refer to as the recruiting process.
