At Arizona, Truth Without the Consequences

Since the NBA, NFL and MLB use the colleges as the training center for elite, but still raw athletes, maybe the NCAA should be "taxed", maybe 10% of the contracts for monthly allowances for all athletes. In reality, college sports takes a great deal of time, typically 30+ hours during the sports season (I know, my son is the head golf coach at a DII school, and they practice or play at least 18 holes a day, walking the course.) And they get only partial scholarships. Why not get some spending money for going to the movies, etc..?

The NCAA will do nothing (see: UNC). Although Self & Miller, without doubt, funneled hundreds of thousands to players and their families, the institution tasked with enforcing the institutional rules is a joke. It’s primary mission is to protect cash flow at the top AND keep the athletes poor as dirt. It’s a terrible, terrible system.

What is ridiculous is that a prize winning professor of any kind is paid a pittance by comparison. Think about how many deserving students might receive a scholarship out of those funds too. I graduated from Arizona and received a solid education there. And I even like basketball! But until they sort out some reasonable priorities, they are going to receive little support from me.

The fault lies with the NCAA, which is, most would agree, a complete joke.

Just quit watching and caring. Watching and caring creates $1,000,000,000’s a year of sports revenue of which the athletes get $0.00. If you care, just quit. If you watch and care you’re part of the problem.

I don’t know who is culpable. But I do know that assistant coaches are poorly paid and it’s extremely hard for them to advance. So the pressure on them to land a recruit is huge and surely tempts them to commit wrongdoing, even without direct pressure from the head coach.

It must be the shoes. Free education at a university is pay, coaches that win are well payed, go into coaching. Your never a champion if you cheat. These schools should remove these coaches.

Hypocrisy will be the end of civilisation as we know it. The Astros cheated, and denied several other teams the opportunity to fairly compete, and other ball players to opportunity to receive the just rewards of their efforts. The worst is yet to come in every major league city this season. Dozens of wealthy parents bribed their kids way in to elite colleges instead of simply donating half a mil or more to the building or endowment fund. They are going to jail - really? Why? Hypocrisy. And poor Pete Rose, one of the 10 best baseball players ever, sits in commissioner's hell for betting, which is ubitquitous now. But thePED guys, well, they did still have to hit the ball. Hypocrisy. What if we took just a million dollars from the Bball coach and the shoe company and spread it among the 15 players? Or couple of million and spread it among the 150 college football players schools carry? Just so they don't have to hide it. Heck, the minimum one year zero experience NBA contract is $900,000. What would you do to try to get one of those? But then again, how many of the 360 spots are open in any one year? Hypocrisy. Ask any evangelical about protecting the environment, or helping the less fortunate, whether they were born her or not, or treating people with respect and dignity - it is the cornerstone of their faith, or so they would have you believe. Hypocrisy.

Athletes should be paid for their work. Full stop. Write about the exploitation of youth in college sports.

Pay the kids! No one watches the games for these overpaid coaches. They young men wearing the laundry near and dear to your heart is the draw. If Miller's assistants and runners were worthy of jail, so is Miller. And for the comment that Arizona is a draw for top talent, that's laughable. They obviously are getting paid.

Although this article hits all the correct points, there is little if any evidence that Miller made, or knew about, direct payments from himself or his assistant coaches to players to sign with Arizona. I do think he, Pitino and Bill Self -- and every other Div 1 coach who recruits NBA bound players -- knows about how the money flows between shoe companies, agents and players. And, indeed they, for obvious competitive reasons, make it their business to stay informed. As to the whether Miller made direct payments, there just isn't any evidence of it. Remember, the Feds had wire-taps on Miller's phone and they collected all of his documents and text records in a search warrant -- and they never prosecuted him. (Even though they wanted to make a splash.) And, the corrupt assistant coach, who claimed knowledge of Miller payments, had self-serving reasons to explain to the agent and shoe company official why he, the assistant coach, could not deliver DeAndre Ayton as a client to them. (Hence the arguable fabrication on the wire-tap that Miller had already locked him up by making his own payments.) Indeed, the Arizona assistant coach in question was not obviously willing to repeat that claim on the witness stand -- something that would have likely saved him a prison term.

Is there a story here somewhere? Is the author’s insinuation that the US Justice Department intentionally and sinisterly chose not to prosecute the rich, powerful coaches supported by any evidence? Is it a surprise that a guy convicted of crimes is less than credible? Justice was drooling at the possibility they could put Miller, Self or Cal in a perp walk. If only they had evidence rather than here-say.

How is any of this tawdry mess the proper subject for the criminal justice system? Let the NCAA do its own dirty work.

I sat at a table next Sean Miller's at restaurant in Tucson while he had dinner with two boosters. They talked about players shooting and rebounding abilities at lenght. The 'student-athletes'' academic abilities never came up. It is shameful that coaches make millions of dollars while the people doing the actual work get nothing. Most players on revenue generating sports are students as much as I am an athlete.

Powell needs to be more informative about the circus that was the corruption trial that led to the NCAA investigation and how the guys on trial were looking to save themselves after looking to make bribes for shoe companies. There is corruption here. But start with the shoe companies and investigators who were after the "big fish" that Powell is so interested in. What if fame for Powell and investigators depends on entrapment -- especially for the Assistant Coach at Arizona? Is Powell sure about that possibility?

The social purpose of big time sports is to give people something trivial on which to be experts.

I am an Arizona alum who has seen this dance before. I make the assumption that college basketball at the NCAA competitive level is corrupt but also that in the end nothing much will happen. Although the Cats may get hammered this round and some other program the next the fix will continue to be in. It bothers me more that Miller gets the salary he does. I think of my graduations in the 70s debt free and my niece the beginning of this century graduating with debt having paid at least 10 times what I paid in tuition and fees. I've set up 529s for her children knowing it will only continue to get worse. I visit the campus every time I am in Tucson and can only scratch my head at the amount of money that is sunk in basketball and football. But then it is the same all over and won't change.

Once again, Michael, both well written and well researched. Why I always go to your byline. And, why I tell editors and "content managers," in sports, it's all there: business, racial struggle, heartbreak, history, achievement. The Human Comedy.

I'm not really sure why colleges and universities are involved in big business sports. The whole system is nonsensical. These are supposed to be institutions of higher learning competing in the world of ideas not sports fields. For football and basketball they act as minor league teams where all of the benefits accrue to coaches, administrators, and a little bit to the university itself. Somehow we as a culture collectively accept that elite hockey, baseball, and soccer players bypass college and enter low level professional sports straight from high school. In basketball and football it is not accepted. Now, what kinds of socio-economic groups generally excel in each of those sports.

Please let us know when you have actual evidence. So far, we heard 2 people who admitted to wrongdoing also implicate Sean Miller, but where is the hard evidence of Mr. Miller’s actual knowledge or involvement? There are plenty of people in this one-team town who’d like Mr. Miller fired, so this evidence would seem to meet that need. The UArizona Athletics Department restructured Mr. Miller’s contract in light of these allegations, presumably to give the University more leeway in releasing him if wrongdoing were actually found. But where is the actual evidence?

Arizona basketball has been rather dubious since the days of Fred Snowden and his freshman Eric money and Coniel Norman. Lure tried to bring some respectability but as with all of the big programs in the country if you want to win you almost have to play the shadow recruit game or you won’t be employed long. Miller is just another who is going to do what is necessary to continue to get the big bucks.

It's obviously against the current rules to pay the "workers" (i.e., the players), while the NCAA cartel, conferences, coaches and universities cream off the premium revenues from advertising and TV generated by the players' "work." Excessive moralizing in this myopic story points criticism at all the wrong targets, it is high time to give the players their cut legally and take this needless criminal law angle out of big time college sports and start recognizing that the financial engine in this enterprise is the labor, not the monopolists.

The headline of this opinion piece clearly implies Miller ducked the interview after learning of its subject. However, the entire piece is devoid of any evidence that he actually did so for that reason. This is poor, if not ethically abhorrent, journalistic behavior.

Coach Miller is getting the same pass wealthy connected people get in America everyday.I am not surprised .Lest you forget our President boasts he could shoot someone in broad daylight and walk. At least he finally told the truth.

Add Arizona to schools like Kentucky, Louisville, and Syracuse for which I have zero respect. Only the Wildcats are capable of hiring a coach who had a buttload of wins vacated at not one but two programs, UMass and Memphis, prior to arriving to Lexington. UK’s in-state rival 70 miles away, guess where Pitino of strip club and casinos fame coached from 1989-1997. Lie with dogs and get up with fleas.

4 and 5 star recruits and the class of the year? UCLA cleaned their clock twice this year. This is not the Arizona of yore by a long shot.

"Teflon Sean" is the Donald Trump of college basketball.

The University of Virginia Mens Basketball team won the 2019 National Championship without a whiff of the stink of corruption. But dirty programs aren't punished enough to prevent extremely corrupt cultures. Who was punished for the years of fake classes at UNC? Seems like the risk is worth it if you don't value your soul. That said, I'm totally rooting for UNC to beat Duke.

Nothing to see here, let's move on. It's all so easy to do when you're not under oath, and there are actual consequences for lying. Moreover, there are real problems to be addressed here, the massive difference between coaches, recruiters, and fixers, all in their nice suits and expensive cars going into the inner city, and also to poor rural areas, to talk to talented and impressionable youngsters and their parents. Yes, a scholarship is offered, which means room, board, tuition and fees, and books. And, legally, nothing else. All the while, shoe and clothing companies, among others, pour millions of dollars into athletic programs, not one cent of which goes to aid the student-athletes under their care. I may not condone illicit payments to people who clearly have financial needs, but I can understand it. I don't have easy answers to the problems raised here, but the system is broken, and needs to be both fixed and fair.

As long as college presidents and their boards can bask in the glow of the cash and name recognition that big-time college basketball generates, the incentives for coach’s to cheat will continue. Where else could a guy like Sean Miller make the kind of bank he’s getting if not for the sweat of his “student athletes”.