Ex-Louisville coaches accused of directly paying basketball recruits
Danielle Lerner, Louisville Courier JournalPublished 2:24 p.m. ET Oct. 4, 2018 | Updated 3:15 p.m. ET Oct. 4, 2018

Two former University of Louisville men's basketball assistant coaches allegedly made payments to two recruits in an attempt to ensure they committed to play for the Cardinals, further implicating the program in the college hoops recruiting scandal.

Cardinals associate head coach Kenny Johnson allegedly made a payment of $1,300 to the father of former Louisville recruit Brian Bowen, while assistant Jordan Fair reportedly gave a second, unnamed prospect $900.

The accusation was made in court Thursday by federal prosecutors seeking to convict three defendants of bribery and fraud charges linked to the FBI's explosive pay-to-play college basketball investigation.

During testimony Thursday morning from Louisville compliance director John Carns, prosecutor Edward Diskant asked Carns if he was aware of the payments made by Johnson and Fair.

"I didn't know anything about that," Carns testified, answering the same for both questions.

Thursday's allegations are the first time Louisville coaches have been accused of taking direct action to pay recruits as part of a scheme by Adidas officials and other financial advisers to influence prospects to sign with Adidas-sponsored schools.

"We're monitoring the proceedings but are not addressing items from the case at this time," Louisville athletics spokesman Kenny Klein wrote in a text message.

Bowen is one of the central figures in the case as federal prosecutors have charged that an Adidas executive, a former Adidas consultant and a college basketball runner conspired to pay Bowen's family $100,000 in exchange for him committing to play for Louisville.


Bowen's father cut a deal with the prosecution in exchange for immunity and is expected to testify in the trial as early as Thursday afternoon.


Fair and Johnson are also accused of altering Bowen's unofficial visit form to conceal the presence of agent Christian Dawkins, an ex-AAU team director and one of the three defendants on trial in New York.

Louisville fired Fair and Johnson last fall after the scandal broke, following the dismissal of head coach Rick Pitino. None of the three coaches were charged by the FBI or mentioned by name in the federal complaint, although Pitino has been identified as "Coach 2" and since outed Fair as "Coach 1."

The complaint cited a recording of a July 2017 hotel room meeting in Las Vegas in which participants discussed funneling money to the family of a Louisville recruit. The FBI's complaint described a Louisville assistant coach — identified as Coach 1 — as being a part of that hotel-room meeting.

“We gotta be very low key,” Coach 1 said, according to the FBI complaint, given Louisville's NCAA infractions case relating to the previous escort scandal.

The NCAA has been told it cannot investigate the allegations until the FBI completes its investigation, so Johnson and Fair have been neither cleared nor condemned by the NCAA.

Johnson was hired in May as an assistant coach at La Salle University in Philadelphia.

A La Salle athletics spokesman declined to comment Thursday in an email to the Courier Journal.

Fair surfaced this summer coaching on the travel basketball circuit for Team Breakdown, an AAU program in Florida that he had previously helped coach.

Christian Red contributed to this story. Danielle Lerner: 502-582-4042; dlerner@courierjournal.com; Twitter: @Danielle_Lerner. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/daniellel.

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College Football Today - 126 Government St, Mobile,AL, 36602 - Home of The NFL Reese's Senior Bowl

These guys should be getting most of the asst. coach heat. Co-offensive coordinators.

Ballard (KY) 4-star linebacker Jared Casey announced on Twitter yesterday that he was committing to a school on October 10th, either Oregon, Kentucky, Louisville, or Wisconsin.

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A source told me on Thursday that Casey will not choose Louisville on the 10th, going on to say the other schools (UK, Oregon, and Wisconsin) all seem to be in serious contention. A little disappointing to officially here Louisville is not a serious player in his recruitment, although we have known for sometime now that the Cardinals weren't in the greatest position.

This mid is tough as nails and physical. Plays hard. Not the biggest. Not the most athletic. But he gets after it. He’s a mailer and he has that old school feel to him.

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If Alabama is complaining about ANY attendance issues, there’s a systemic problem probably more severe than the previous data suggests. In this age where millions of people watch gamers compete online, OLED TVs, 4K broadcasts, increasing cost of attendance, etc. It makes sense from a qualitative standpoint.


https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.co...s-poor-attendance-alabama-students/1516792002


TUSCALOOSA — Since the on-field competition hasn't been much of a challenge for No. 1 Alabama this season, Nick Saban is taking his fight elsewhere.

During a minute-and-a-half rant Wednesday evening, Saban expressed major disappointment with the half-empty Alabama student section in the south end zone of last Saturday's game against Louisiana-Lafayette.

Alabama head coach Nick Saban in first half action against Texas A&M in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Saturday September 22, 2018.
MICKEY WELSH
"I can honestly say I was a little disappointed there weren't more students at the last game. I think we're trying to address that," Saban said Wednesday. "I don't think they're entitled to anything, either. Me personally, I think (seats) ought to be first-come, first-serve. If they don't want to come to the game, they don't have to come. But I'm sure there's enough people around here that would like to go to the games, and we'd like for them to come too because they support the players."

Saban's unprompted diatribe came in response to a question about how many Alabama fans are supporting Hawaii-born sophomore quarterback Tua Tagovailoa by wearing leis to games this season.

Before going even further in on the Alabama students, Saban acknowledged student support and fan attendance has seemingly waned in the decade-plus that he's been in Tuscaloosa.

"When I first came here, you used to play that tradition thing up there (on the video board) and everybody was cheering and excited and happy and there was great spirit," Saban continued. "Now they don't even cheer. They introduce our players and nobody even cheers. So I don't know, maybe there's something else somebody else ought to talk about. Maybe I shouldn't talk about it. Maybe I already talked about it more than I should."

Although the listed attendance for last Saturday's 11 a.m. kickoff was 101,471, the wealth of empty seats in the usually-full student section behind the south goal post was blatantly noticeable and something many fans and even a few players commented on after the game.

Alabama senior running back Damien Harris even quote-tweeted a picture of the mostly-empty student section with the comment: "This makes me sad, if I’m being all the way honest."

Saban made it clear the Crimson Tide players — both current and future — deserve better support than what they received Saturday.

"Look, our players work too hard and they deserve to have everything and people supporting them in every way and have tremendous spirit for what they've done," Saban said. "But there's a part of it where other people need to support them too, and there's got to be a spirit that makes it special to play here, because that's what makes it special to be here. And if that's not here, then does it continue to be special to be here or not? That's the question everybody has to ask, and I'm asking it right now."

"So I'm hopeful. We've always had great people travel on the road for us and had great spirit on the road," Saban continued, calming down near the end. "We have great fans. So I appreciate that. But to see half the student section not full, I've never seen that since I've been here before."

On a Friday night, with high school football being the limiting factor of recruits making it to the game, the Cardinals' visitor list will definitely not be as big and impressive as it was last week. Still, Louisville is expecting a handful of visitors including a couple top targets in the class of 2019 and 2020. Here is the full list expected to be in attendance Friday night.

Offensive Line
Nathan Stotts

Quarterback
Rae'Von Vaden
Lorenzo White
Chaz Burks
Luke Duby
Terrance Hearn

Running Back
Aidan Robbins - Commit

Wide Receiver
U'Kari Baker
DeAndre Caldwell - 3 star
Tevin Shipp
Malik Bowen - 3 star
Jordan Watkins - 3 star

Athlete
Micaleous Elder
Kobe Okeke
Jaden Wilson
Reggie Grimes - 4 star
Quentin Knight
Tyler Lansden
Brandon Wright

Specialist
Jack Breedlove

Cornerback
Antoine Jamison
Martel Smith
Jallen Johnson
Josh Minkins - 3 star

Defensive Back
Vito Tisdale - 4 star
Keemanuel Ligget

Defensive End
Shamar Vanzant
JJ Weaver - 4 star
Khalil Wilson
Dallas Walker - 3 star

Defensive Tackle
Ricky Barber
Marlon Alexander
Ryan Jackson

Linebacker
Devon Dillehay
Jackson Juett
Cooper Lewis
Ramon Puryear Jr.
Jordan Cameron
Aaron Moore -3 star
Aiden Moore
Hosea Knifely

Safeties
Jacob Dingle
Shi Keem Laister
Elijah Pankey

https://www.goiowaawesome.com/the-big-ten/2018/09/3108/the-big-ten-needs-to-contract

There was a time, not that long ago when The Big Ten was actually a big ten. From 1952 to 1992, the league was made up of core schools in a basic footprint. Ohio State in the east, Iowa in the west, eight other schools in between. And while it might not have been the most interesting football conference -- two schools in particular had a tendency to win all the time -- it certainly wasn't totally embarrassing (1970s Iowa and pretty-much-the-entire-timeframe Northwestern notwithstanding).

But Ohio State/Michigan/Hayden-era Iowa/occasionally interesting Mike White-era Illinois weren't enough for the league, especially once the NCAA stranglehold on televised football came to an end. And so the conference added some star power: Joe Paterno's Penn State, which was the first post-ten Big Ten team in 1993. The Nittany Lions spent the rest of the 90s running the show, going 70-16 overall and 41-15 in the conference. And then Paterno finally slipped for a while on the field, and then Paterno's mistakes off the field ended his tenure.

Penn State was a decent fit. It was in a state further east than any other Big Ten school, but the school was still largely Midwestern. It's west of the Appalachians. It has a dairy. It's in the middle of nowhere, and it was a traditional football powerhouse that was still relevant at the time it was added. Furthermore, Penn State didn't lose its recruiting territory when it came to the Big
Ten; many of its players were drawn from within the Big Ten footprint or neighboring states, where Penn State Football was still Penn State Football. If you take away the horrible crimes committed within its program and the stigma that came from those crimes, there would be little reason to dispute Penn State's inclusion in the conference.

But that's a big 'if'.

We were told that business mandated expansion to include Nebraska in 2011. The Big Ten Network, the biggest gamble ever taken by the league, was a gigantic success, a money tree that somehow didn't grow so large that it harmed the conference's top-tier broadcast rights.

But the Big Ten Network/broadcast television revenue model bastardized the league's goals. Now the league wanted big names -- and the big national broadcast dollars their games could command -- and cable-connected local television sets with cable companies willing to pay absurd carriage fees for BTN.

Jim Delany first used all of his television money to destabilize the Big 12, correctly sensing that the conference was quickly falling into a black hole centered in Austin and that its lack of history and geography made divisions natural and inevitable. He waved a bunch of cash at Nebraska and promoted the Big Ten's all-for-one mentality, and suddenly Nebraska was a Big Ten team.

But the Nebraska that Delany landed was a decade removed from relevance. They had jettisoned not just their coach and staff, but their entire philosophy, in 2004. The result had been a disaster, at least compared to the previous decade's standard, and a second coaching change had peaked with the Cornhuskers as a solid also-ran in the Big 12.

Nebraska's move to the Big Ten didn't do anything to help bolster the Huskers. Quite to the contrary, it added a modicum of academic standards missing in those mid-90s teams. And to the extent that Nebraska had a post-Osborne recruiting philosophy -- Texas, California, Florida, sometimes all at once -- it certainly wasn't inside the Big Ten footprint. Nebraska's previous mistakes had made it less relevant on the national stage; Nebraska's move to the Big Ten only accelerated the slide.

In 2014, Delany shocked the world by adding Maryland and Rutgers to the conference. It was a blatant play for cable-connected televisions in Washington D.C. and New York City, and nothing more. Maryland athletics was saddled with crippling debt that Big Ten lucre could fix; Rutgers was essentially a mid-major program. Neither had a football program with any sort of history; Maryland had won a single ACC championship since 1985, and Rutgers had long since lost program savior Greg Schiano to the NFL, quickly falling back into the lower tiers of mediocrity.

(con't)

I don't see why this has not gotten more play. Hopefully this will lead to what we all already know.


On Wednesday, Sood also acknowledged during cross-examination by Dawkins' attorney, Steve Haney, that he met with Pina and another man to discuss paying then-Kentucky forward Bam Adebayo and other UK players in hopes of landing them as clients for his financial management company.

"Stephen Pina was trying to position you by paying Bam Adebayo, and other kids at Kentucky, and he told you it would be expensive, didn't he?" Haney asked.

"Yes," Sood replied.

"And you understood that to mean that you were going to have to pay a lot of money to get those kids from Kentucky, didn't you?" Haney asked.

"Yes," Sood said.

http://www.espn.com/mens-college-ba...n-trial-drags-names-markelle-fultz-kyle-kuzma

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Team is wearing all black and the fans are encouraged to wear all black as well.

No AD in their right mind should replace the HC mid season. So Bobby has 7 games to turn this season around. I for one hope he does because there’s no guarantee the new BOT will spend the money needed to bring in a top coach. So it really benefits everyone that Bobby gets it together. And there’s really nothing any of us can do except support the team.

If it doesn’t turn around then I hope there’s money out there if Vince decides to replace Bobby and that the BOT supports that.

Granted that's a low bar...

I heard Mack speak for a few minutes tonite at the Denny Crum golf fund raiser at the PNC Club. He was obviously very complimentary of Denny's history with U of L. But in his respect for U of L history, he also mentioned the "phenomenal job" that Pitino did here during his tenure.

That's a guy comfortable enough in his own skin--and secure in his contract--to speak the truth and hopefully what he thinks. Even if it isn't what he thinks and even if a majority of people in the room didn't need to hear it, Mack was covering the bases. He didn't know who was there taking notes and checking off on his perspective.

Maybe in time, he can impart some of that wisdom to his boss...

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She's a 6-foot guard from Berkeley, Missouri, who is rated No. 8 overall in the class of 2019.

LINK to profile: http://www.espn.com/high-school/girls-basketball/recruiting/player/_/id/221253

Committing to Florida over SuCk put Igiehon at risk of going to SuCk? Scottie Lewis committed tonight so I wonder if that changes the landscape?

Hey do one of you guys have a link to the video that was shown at Louisville Live the other night. The link from the front page does seem to work for me. I really want to check it out. It seems that Coach Mack is going to really bring not only his style of play but his mentality to U of L and the ACC. Thank you in advance.GO CARDS!

https://www.scouttrout.com/breaking-news/find-out-why-so-many-d1-football-teams-have-started-recruiting-10-ranked-2020-top-100-ath-recruit-jake-deluccia-from-wayne-valley-hs-nj

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https://www.scouttrout.com/breaking-news/2019-wr-recruit-robert-ricucci-out-of-martin-luther-king-hs-ca-is-one-heck-of-a-overall-athlete-new-recruit-report



https://www.collegefootballtoday.org/



Top 2020 ATH Recruits Rankings

https://www.collegefootballtoday.org/20-ath-rankings.html

Biggest hit a kicker has ever made

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College Football Today - 126 Government St, Mobile, Alabama 36602

That’s how I feel about us getting Chris Mack. At first I was skeptical because I wanted to go after a more high profile coach. But he and his family have won me over. They just interviewed Christi Mack on Wave 3. They seem so normal. A vast difference from the Pitino’s. I walked right by Mack Saturday at the game. I never saw Rick in public. In contrast I’ve run into Denny several times over the years.

I look at it this way. Rick looked at UofL as “they’re darn lucky to have me”.

Chris Mack “I’m darn lucky to be at UofL”

Slightly different wording, but vastly different attitudes.

Petrino has set up some great plays. U of L's quarterback is just not completing his passes. So stop blaming coach Petrino.

Its time for a new coach.

He is currently in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Beating the Corn 42-28.

He
Is
Done

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Basically, from the way I and several others take it, Bowen's father is took a plea deal and is testifying in FAVOR of the Government, which is claiming that these men defrauded the Universities. Therefore, things are going to come out sooner rather than later. However, I find it hard to believe that this hurts us in any way as Bowen's father knows the behind the scenes situation and since he is testifying FOR the government and NOT the defendant (Gatto), one would think that it's going to come out that this situation was more on Gatto than on any UofL coaching staff since the Gov claims universities are the victims and were defrauded in these situations.