Scandal in Storrs

The big news of the day is not related to what's going to happen on the court the next 4 days. It's about what's been happening on the recruiting trail and in the back rooms of UConn's men's basketball offices.

As part of their commendable effort to investigate the relationships between sports agents and college basketball programs, Dan Wetzel and Adrian Wojnarowski have conducted a thorough investigation of UConn's recruitment of Nate Miles and are reporting that it was fraught with violations of NCAA rules. Unless they are simply fabricating records, they seem to have nailed UConn for, at a minimum, excessive phone calls. The bigger issue they identify, though, is UConn's relationship with a former team manager named Josh Nochimson. Nochimson, it appears, is one of many agents-slash-business-managers-slash-parasites who are polluting the current youth and college basketball landscape. And it appears that the UConn coaching staff was in bed with him, which, because he was effectively a representative of the program and paying for this and that for Nate Miles, is not just an ethical problem, it's a major rules violation.

As an Indiana fan who has had to put up with the fallout of Kelvin Sampson's Phonegate, someone who generally finds Jim Calhoun dislikable, and someone who has heard rumors of UConn's running a dirty program, I hope the NCAA comes down hard on the Huskies.

Wetzel and Wojnarowski are doing good, important work, and I hope they keep up with it. One of the frustrating things about college basketball recruiting is that everyone knows who's cheating, but no one will say. It's about time the major college hoops media stopped trying to be every coach's friend so they could get access and started acting like journalists.

Here is the piece re: the unholy nexus between college hoops, AAU programs, and agents that W&W published a few weeks ago. Both this and the UConn article are worthy reads.