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#1 ranked recruit being investigated for improper benefits

If you recall -- NCAA has bellowed many warnings that they are going to get serious and penalize players and programs that are involved with this exact type of cheating and impermissible benefits...

there was even a lot of hooting that NCAA did just that a week ago when they came down REALLY hard on Central Florida...
http://bradleyfans.com/vb/showthread.php?t=21280&highlight=ncaa


so we should expect a very prompt and severe penalty? - since this kid's connections to the sleazy, banned agents is so well known that many schools didn't even bother to try to recruit the kid....right?
...nope - expect some long delayed ruling that, like the Cam Newton ruling, uses some horribly illogical argument to get the kid off easy
...or like Ryan Boatright, Josh Selby, John Wall, and others got nothing or only got a couple games suspension and their schools never got penalized at knowing they were asking for payoffs.. LINK
 
Wow, hope they get that worked out before the Sycamores go to LA to open the new Pauley Pavillion on November 9th. Hate to give them any excuses when we beat their a$$ ?

;)
 
Here's yet another report of a player being paid during the recruiting to choose a certain school...
The story is amazing with details sufficient to and believable...you'll have to click to see the name of the school..

this kid has absolutely nothing to gain by saying this, he's already blown his career and is in prison...and clearly has no bone to pick - just decided to come clean...
..and sincerely hopes his tale will help some other young players from making the same mistakes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/s...tory-is-a-cautionary-tale.html?pagewanted=all

"..Hargett spoke of dealing with an agent at 15 and of eventually choosing to attend *********** because he was offered $20,000.

..Hargett wanted to go to Arizona. The Wildcats won the national title in 1997
and had recently had a string of star guards like Miles Simon, Mike Bibby and
Jason Terry on their roster. Coach Lute Olson made two trips to watch
Hargett in high school, but the Wildcats could not get Hargett to visit their
campus. He said that Arizona refused to break N.C.A.A. rules and fly out his
mother for a recruiting trip.

But *********** put together a more intriguing package for the Hargett
family. Mike Hargett’s wife, Joy, said that ********** planned on hiring her
husband for a low-level staff position, which was allowable under N.C.A.A.
rules. Mike Hargett had worked for the ********** assistant Chris Cheeks
at a Richmond high school years before. Jonathan Hargett did not want to go
to **********, but he said that he was offered $20,000 a year to go there
and that he committed at Mike’s urging.

Payments from *********** to Hargett could not be independently verified,
and coaches and officials who were at *********** at the time deny
knowledge of payment. Hargett also said that when he was asked by the
N.C.A.A. if he received any money from ************, he lied to preserve
his eligibility.

But Hargett says now that a deal was in place and that after Mike Hargett
died, he honored his brother’s wishes and went there.

“He was going to be a coach, and they were going to give him a house,”
Hargett said of *********** and his brother. “At the time, he had three
kids.”

.... Still, there were complications. Hargett said he never received the full
$20,000 he expected. Instead, he said he received $13,000 to $17,000 total,
some from *********** and some from Anderson, the intermediary for
Holloway, the financial adviser.

After an early-season game during his freshman season, Hargett said his
mother told him that Cheeks, the ********** assistant, gave her $5,000 “in
a bag.” Hargett said his mother gave him 10 $100 bills, and he and his
girlfriend went to a mall where they bought Air Jordans, Timberlands and a
few pairs of jeans. Hargett said he never knew the source of the money but
thought that it came from Brett Bearup, a financial adviser who was
prominent on the Amateur Athletic Union scene at that time. Hargett said his
mother had met Bearup at a tournament...."

 
btw- even further on in that article is a the part where the kid's college coach was fired then replaced by Dan Dakich - who immediately finds the corruption so bad at his new hire that he quits in a matter of days and returns to Bowling Green (kinda pulling a Dana Altman even before Dana did it)
...but in effect Dakich's own words confirm the accuracy of Hargett's story about the payoffs...
Funny how the Big East & NCAA never bothered to ven look into this one despite being tipped off plenty (note the comments from then New Mexico coach Fran Fraschilla)

...and B4L - just don't want to see the inevitable small minded accusations that the only reason this was posted was to attack a certain school
Honestly - I know this story is 10-12 years old but I think the problem is probably far worst now, the NCAA knows ALL ABOUT IT, and constantly looks the other way pretending it doesn't happen - and enabling it to go on and on -
every once in a while clobbering a North Florida or handing meaningless or non-existent penalties to a Kelvin Sampson ...
 
followup to this story ..
UCLA star Shabazz Muhammad's father has now been involved in a bank fraud case...
but the details also include that Muhammad's father got a huge "loan" with his son's future PRO basketball earnings used as collateral!
This is a HUGE violation of NCAA amateurism rules - obviously a player on a college team nor his family can receive any financial benefit from his abilities or role as a member of the team.
Let's see if the NCAA bothers to even notice, tho, as this is similar to the USC/Reggie Bush case - but NCAA wouldn't even give it a sniff until there was a massive crescendo of criticism of them in the media...
http://www.buzzfeed.com/joelanderson/father-of-former-ucla-hoops-star-took-loan
 
tornado said:
This column says that UCLA even knew about the money being given tot he kid...
http://www.ocregister.com/ucla/fallout-608097-honeycutt-likely.html
Click to expand...

That is a pretty misleading way to characterize an article that indicates UCLA did everything right, including by immediately reporting the potential violations to the NCAA as soon as it became aware of them:

"Twice, UCLA was alerted of the benefits ??“ first by Lookofsky in 2011, and then by a reporter in February. In both instances, UCLA immediately reported the potential violation to the Pac-12 Conference and the NCAA. In 2011, an investigation into the allegations ended after four months when Lookofsky, Honeycutt and any other parties involved refused to cooperate. In February, according to a statement from Athletic Director Dan Guerrero, UCLA and the NCAA both reached out again to Lookofsky for an interview but were rebuffed."
 
so -- they knew about the benefits - just because nobody cooperated and everyone else looked the other way -
I certainly don't see that as a legit alibi for why UCLA still took the kid, played him, and pretended nothing wrong ever happened...but then I guess it's the status quo out there....
I remember the case of Renardo Sydney - a kid that UCLA thought was worth putting up in a nice house in California as they tried to find a way to get him eligible.
Ultimately they couldn't so when he was deemed ineligible UCLA dropped him and the story of his freebie luxury home came to light.
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/20/sports/sp-sidney-ucla20
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/news/story?id=4137169
 
tornado said:
so -- they knew about the benefits - just because nobody cooperated and everyone else looked the other way -
I certainly don't see that as a legit alibi for why UCLA still took the kid, played him, and pretended nothing wrong ever happened...
Click to expand...

Again, not accurate. Your link says "Lookofsky contacted former coach Ben Howland in spring 2011 after Honeycutt signed with another agent before the NBA draft. Howland then alerted administrators, and the NCAA soon launched an investigation."

So there is no evidence UCLA knew anything about any impermissble benefits at the time they played him, let alone when they took him (2010-11 was his sophmore and final season at UCLA). To the contrary, they appear to have alerted the NCAA and opened an investigation as soon as they were alerted to the fact something was wrong (which was after he had declared for the draft and ended his UCLA career).

The insinutation that he was paid to go to UCLA is also misleading, given that the person who claims to have made them doesn't appear to be a booster or connected to the school in any way, but rather is a sports agent who was hoping to represent him after school.
 
it doesn't matter who pays him one tiny bit --
Remember - there isn't the tiniest hint that Bradley ever paid Patrick O'Bryant but the NCAA attacked like a bat out of *** when they sniffed the possibility that O'Bryant maybe got money from anyone while he was an athlete.

If the kid got payments from anyone, it was a violation and it would have been the responsibility of UCLA even if they used the alibi that they didn't know...
remember - Bradley didn't know and the NCAA said that was NOT an allowable alibi.

BUT - getting paid by an agent is actually one of the most serious offenses of any possible because it does give UCLA a huge advantage if any other recruits then know they have a better chance of cashing in - so they'd gravitate to UCLA - whoa - what a RECRUITING ADVANTAGE!!

But worse - it then makes the kid a professional and thus he is an ineligible athlete and so all the games he played in should be forfeited --
we likely won't ever see that unless we have the "Reggie-Bush-like" uproar in the media that forced NCAA to act against USC...

Nope - expect this one to drop into oblivion like most cheating scandals a the big schools....the NCAA would be happy if it just went away as quick as possible.
 
I did not argue there is no problem with receiving payments from an agent. Obviously that is a violation and would have made him ineligible. But it is absurd to claim "it doesn't matter who pays him one tiny bit." Do you really think there is no difference between a school that knowingly pays a player, and one that unknowingly plays a player who received improper payments from someone completely unconnected to the school? I suspect that Bradley would have been hit a lot harder if POB had been given cash by the coaching staff.

I don't follow your logic regarding a supposed recruiting advantage. I have seen nothing indicating Honeycutt was paid because he was at UCLA. Presumably, the agent who supposedly paid him would have given him the same no matter where he was going to school. He got paid (assuming the agent's story is true) because he was a NBA prospect, not because of anything having to do with the school.
 
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