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since cheating is in the news all the time now -here's a couple thoughts since I am one of the fans who has lived thru 6 or 7 decades of this stuff...
-First - back in the 1940's, college basketball was as clean as it gets...there wasn't really any money to speak of- so no need to cheat. Even some of the very best basketball players went to tiny schools (Bob Cousy- Holy Cross, Ron Bontemps- Beloit College) since their reasoning centered on loyalty not money.
-Cheating emerged in the 1950's & 1960's - but it was pretty low level and almost comical by today's standards.
Some of the players tried to supplement their income by working with the gamblers to fix the scores.
And - as was alleged about Bradley & Chet Walker - some schools literally kidnapped recruits and "urged them to sign".
-But the 1970's brought in the bigger money era and cheating graduated into the big time.
The more prominent college basketball cheating tho- took a distant back seat to the cheating that was going on in FOOTBALL. This was the era when football schools had the system figured out and were blatantly having their boosters funnel lavish gifts and cash to recruits and players. The first school nailed was the sacrificial lamb, Southwest Louisiana and others escaped penalties. SW Louisiana was given the DEATH PENALTY - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisi...27s_basketball
-So, once someone got caught, cheating became a big time spy-operation. Now schools had to devise more and more secretive and shrewd ways to cheat and not get caught.
Kentucky - the only other school at that point who had also gotten the death penalty (in 1952) became the poster boy on how to get it done...and that ushered in the 1980's
University of Kentucky, with Eddie Sutton at the helm, in the mid-1980's, starting having their top assistants do the dirty work.
Sutton ordered Dwayne Casey to land the top recruits no matter what level of blatant cheating took place but because the only "hands-on" were Casey's, then Sutton could plead his innocence (and ignorance) - altho we all know better.
Well, the classic example of cheating happened in April of 1988. A package mailed by Casey to TOP, BLUE-CHIPPER recruit Chris Mills, fell off a conveyor at Emery Freight and broke open, spilling out $1,200 in hundred dollar bills.
It was as obvious as can be what was going on - and even tho NCAA tried to look the other way- public and media pressure forced NCAA to investigate.
In the end NCAA cited UK for cheating but penalties were miniscule.
-But by the 1990's and beyond, cheating got more secretive and sophisticated - with the money changing hands more cleverly, altho plenty of big schools still got caught (or implicated) - USC/Tim Floyd (OJ Mayo), Calipari (Derrick Rose/Anthony Davis), etc.
But now the cheating is so sophisticated that very FEW schools ever get caught - and even when they do, NCAA has let a lot of them slide. As long as there's enough money (and the shoe companies see to that) everyone pretty much is happy to let the cheating go on and shut up. Some schools - even when they get caught - like Louisville and the others in the current FBI sting - simply lawyer up and intimidate everyone and so hardly anything ever changes. Meanwhile NCAA tries to deflect attention from the big school cheating by slapping any smaller school hard even if their examples of cheating are laughably minor - such as the inadvertent overpay in a summer job or someone paying for a tai for a recruit.
-First - back in the 1940's, college basketball was as clean as it gets...there wasn't really any money to speak of- so no need to cheat. Even some of the very best basketball players went to tiny schools (Bob Cousy- Holy Cross, Ron Bontemps- Beloit College) since their reasoning centered on loyalty not money.
-Cheating emerged in the 1950's & 1960's - but it was pretty low level and almost comical by today's standards.
Some of the players tried to supplement their income by working with the gamblers to fix the scores.
And - as was alleged about Bradley & Chet Walker - some schools literally kidnapped recruits and "urged them to sign".
-But the 1970's brought in the bigger money era and cheating graduated into the big time.
The more prominent college basketball cheating tho- took a distant back seat to the cheating that was going on in FOOTBALL. This was the era when football schools had the system figured out and were blatantly having their boosters funnel lavish gifts and cash to recruits and players. The first school nailed was the sacrificial lamb, Southwest Louisiana and others escaped penalties. SW Louisiana was given the DEATH PENALTY - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisi...27s_basketball
-So, once someone got caught, cheating became a big time spy-operation. Now schools had to devise more and more secretive and shrewd ways to cheat and not get caught.
Kentucky - the only other school at that point who had also gotten the death penalty (in 1952) became the poster boy on how to get it done...and that ushered in the 1980's
University of Kentucky, with Eddie Sutton at the helm, in the mid-1980's, starting having their top assistants do the dirty work.
Sutton ordered Dwayne Casey to land the top recruits no matter what level of blatant cheating took place but because the only "hands-on" were Casey's, then Sutton could plead his innocence (and ignorance) - altho we all know better.
Well, the classic example of cheating happened in April of 1988. A package mailed by Casey to TOP, BLUE-CHIPPER recruit Chris Mills, fell off a conveyor at Emery Freight and broke open, spilling out $1,200 in hundred dollar bills.
It was as obvious as can be what was going on - and even tho NCAA tried to look the other way- public and media pressure forced NCAA to investigate.
In the end NCAA cited UK for cheating but penalties were miniscule.
-But by the 1990's and beyond, cheating got more secretive and sophisticated - with the money changing hands more cleverly, altho plenty of big schools still got caught (or implicated) - USC/Tim Floyd (OJ Mayo), Calipari (Derrick Rose/Anthony Davis), etc.
But now the cheating is so sophisticated that very FEW schools ever get caught - and even when they do, NCAA has let a lot of them slide. As long as there's enough money (and the shoe companies see to that) everyone pretty much is happy to let the cheating go on and shut up. Some schools - even when they get caught - like Louisville and the others in the current FBI sting - simply lawyer up and intimidate everyone and so hardly anything ever changes. Meanwhile NCAA tries to deflect attention from the big school cheating by slapping any smaller school hard even if their examples of cheating are laughably minor - such as the inadvertent overpay in a summer job or someone paying for a tai for a recruit.
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