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Despite the March Madness hype, the NCAA as we know it is doomed. Every week, there's new news about lawsuits threatening the NCAA. Dartmouth College student-athletes vote to unionize, children in California claim to be university employees, tennis players sue for prize money won in professional tournaments, legal This is a series of lawsuits. The action is long and keeps growing. Back in 2021, the Supreme Court announced in NCAA v. Alston that if an antitrust lawsuit challenging the association's amateurism regime goes to court, it will be overturned. As the walls of college sports begin to close in, the NCAA has adopted a policy that allows students to be compensated based on name, image, and likeness, a system intended to provide some form of compensation and equity within existing universities. NIL). system. But recent reforms – transfer portals, booster clubs, secretive and potentially corrupt new recruitment methods – taken together do not address the real injustices and hypocrisies of amateurism.
In reporting my forthcoming book on corruption in college sports, hot dog money, We've discovered an unexpected reason why the NCAA may soon be abolished, and it's probably not what you're thinking. Let me explain. In the summer of 2019, a Pittsburgh businessman named Marty Blaser was asked to tell his story to a group of NCAA officials charged with enforcing the rules of the amateur system. For the previous five years, Blazer had been an undercover federal agent investigating corruption in college sports. Blazer, who once served as a financial advisor to NFL football players, became embroiled in a fraudulent scheme in which he embezzled more than $2 million from clients to fund his ill-fated foray into the entertainment industry, including It also included financing the soon-to-be-forgotten film “''. mafia. In an attempt to avoid his incarceration, Blazer confessed to his crimes to the government before being indicted, giving prosecutors in the Southern District of New York an unprecedented inside account of rampant cheating and falsehoods in college sports. provided to.
Sent undercover by the FBI, Blazer offered bribes to high-level college basketball coaches in exchange for the coaches agreeing to secretly steer the best prospects to his financial advisory firm. Several major basketball programs have been directly involved, with coaches smuggling hundreds of thousands of dollars under the table to agree to collusion to persuade top players to sign as Blazer customers, and the fact that They trafficked older children. Blazer wore a wire and worked with undercover FBI agents to trap more than a dozen coaches in an elaborate conspiracy that uncovered corruption in basketball programs at schools including Louisville, Arizona, LSU and USC. .
Blazer had never spoken about himself outside of official circles until he received a meeting request from the NCAA, but now he is sitting in a conference room at a hotel near Pittsburgh's airport with more than a dozen officials on the other side. I was placed and seated. conference table.
“I can be yours Catch Me If You Can'' Blazer told NCAA officials, explaining that he had no intention of ever getting involved in the sports management business again, and thus no involvement in the game at all. He spoke candidly about things that the underworld of college sports would never reveal to outsiders, let alone regulators who might change the rules of the game. Blazer explains how this system actually works and how coaches, sneaker companies, agents, financial advisors, boosters, and unsavory hustlers and runners are involved in a vast conspiracy to circumvent amateurism rules. He explained.
“Hot dog money” was a euphemism for the large sums of cash the Blazers continued to swindle college athletes to secure business when they turned pro. Envelopes stuffed with cash were routinely sent by courier to girlfriends and parents to avoid leaving a direct paper trail for the players. Blazer explained that bribing coaches was a key element of this structure because coaches are trusted advisors and gatekeepers to children and their families. Giving coaches cash to steer players toward the Blazers was a genius business model, and smart executives could make millions off one kid.
Blazer told the regulator that the number of coaches who offered bribes was 100 percent. The coaches who offered the bribes were all eager to take FBI money. Blazer believed that college basketball most closely resembled an organized criminal enterprise, tying an entire country into its territory, much like the Mafia once did.
Blazer then mentioned the dangers of NIL programs that allow players to make money by making trades to use Personas. Blazer told NCAA officials that the NIL will only make things worse for student-athletes. NIL contracts are the first commercial reality for teenage student-athletes with virtually no protection from unscrupulous actors as boosters, brands and coaches try to persuade the best players to sign them. I'm going to do it.
“I told them the key was NIL regulation,” Blazer recalls. hot dog money. “I told them that if they let NIL go wild, if NIL becomes the Wild West, a never-ending parade of bastards like me will prey on our children. Top players. Kids who can get national attention from reputable companies would probably be okay if they did. But mid-level kids would be fooled and seduced into bad deals with boosters. Smart businessmen. The kids won't understand how the NCAA is taking advantage of them. The NCAA absolutely had to protect the kids or it's going to be a while before the NIL system explodes in front of them. It was a problem. The NCAA is throwing students into the wolf camp.”
Blazer told me that as he spoke, he noticed a kind of glazed look in the NCAA officials' eyes. It seemed to Blazer that he didn't want to hear his direct warning about NIL. It occurred to Blazer that their ignorance of the underlying realities of corruption in college sports wasn't due to naivety; it was the business model. The NCAA coach had known for a long time – everyone knew it – that he was kidding, but the brazenness of his attitude shocked the former financial advisor.
After speaking at length for seven hours and uncovering many previously unknown conspiracies, Blazer asked NCAA officials if they had any questions. Blazer's story had a lot of nuance and surprising twists, so he expected some solid dialogue. No, NCAA officials said they had no further questions. A pin-drop silence fell. Instead of taking up the portrait of corruption presented by the Blazers, the NCAA appears to have preferred willful ignorance, or plausible deniability. (Blazer passed away this year from natural causes at the age of 53.)
The NCAA's failure to provide college students with even the basic protection of NIL rights (admittedly a worthy regulatory goal) reveals the hypocrisy and greed that will be at the heart of the demise of college sports as currently constructed. ing. As the Supreme Court predicts the end of the monopoly of college amateurism, the recent end of the monopoly on real estate agent commissions seems an apt metaphor for America's deeply entrenched educational institutions that are fundamentally corrupt. . The NCAA is squeezing amateurism by billions of dollars as much as possible, but as Ernest Hemingway once noted of how the rich go bankrupt, the death of college sports. will be rapid and ferocious. What happens next is not yet clear, but as Marty Blazer told the NCAA, desperately relying on unregulated NIL programs will not fix a broken system. No amount of March Madness can change that reality.
Guy Lawson has always been rolling stone Contributor, his books Hot Dog Money: Inside the biggest scandal in college sports history It will be in bookstores this June. Pre-order your copy here:
