O.J. Mayo obviously wasn’t the first or last player to be wooed by agents and runners and shoe companies before even stepping foot on a college campus. Why?
Because it’s common practice in youth league basketball. And it has been for years.
I don’t think the average college basketball fan, including me, fully appreciates the depth and breadth of the corruption that has enveloped youth league basketball. Some of these problems may have been limit had the NCAA not decided to decrease the amount of contact college coaches could have with athletes during a player’s recruitment. At least the coaches are accountable to their own athletic directors, school presidents, other coaches and ultimately the NCAA itself.
As it stands now, the agents, AAU coaches and anyone wanting to get a piece of these young athletes have no such accountability.
And there’s the rub.
The NCAA is powerless to control individuals working outside of its jurisdiction.
Though I’m no NCAA apologist—in my estimation the institution only pays lip service to its concern for “student athletes” (which, in the revenue sports, is a laughable moniker)—I do love to watch college sports.
I think we’ve been talking a great deal about what the NCAA needs to do to protect the “integrity” of amateur athletics, what needs to be done to penalize USC and even what should happen to people like Mayo. I think it’s fine to be concerned about these issues.
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I just think we need to re-frame the argument.
Let’s face it. A fair number of youngsters are tainted long before college coaches ever get a chance to talk to them. We’re talking about junior high kids being lured by shoe companies and agents and runners. Kids are making decisions, not in their best interest, but in the interest of some schemer or group of schemers who dabble in a multitude of illegal activities.
Incidentally, some of these illegal activities likely include the sale or use of drugs. And from there a whole new set of issues arise.
Sadly, the kids are expendable. If their games don’t develop or they top out at only 5’9” or get severely injured, the supposed “adults” and “mentors” move on to the next big thing so they can hopefully hit the jackpot with the next one.
My point is, if Mayo had busted a knee his junior year of high school, I probably wouldn’t be writing this right now.
But how can the NCAA control this?
I understand that adolescent boys who have nothing and come from nothing are going to accept shoes and clothes from seedy characters. That actually makes sense to me. At the earliest stages of this process, opportunistic “men” are victimizing teenage boys in the hopes of riding the gravy train to fortune and (secondarily) respect in basketball circles.
By the end of the process, everybody, including the player, knows what’s going on. Although a younger more naive Mayo wouldn't know that he should not accept a pair of shoes from a guy like Rodney Guillory, receiving a 42" flatscreen TV as a freshman should have concerned him.
The Mayo situation is truly a mess. To start, most states have laws governing the conduct of agents. So there’s one problem. Moreover, a phony charity’s credit card was used to obtain a multitude of items for Mayo. At least one fraudulent credit card account was opened. These are federal crimes.
And this is par for course. This is the current landscape of youth league basketball.
Thanks to universities like USC turning a blind eye, it continues to happen in college sports.
Some have said the best way to remedy the present situation is to do away with “one and done.”
That's all well and good, but it's also completely out of the NCAA’s hands. It’s collectively bargained in the NBA labor agreement. Which, though it certainly impacts the NCAA, certainly can’t be changed by the NCAA.
More importantly, we’ve only recently concluded the second college basketball season that has been affected by the NBA age limit. The questionable activities taking place in youth league basketball extend well beyond 20 years.
That’s the system we need to fix.
The NCAA may be able to help.
But, alas, the NCAA cannot do it alone. The culture of corruption and self interest at the youth league level needs to change.
Let’s not get our hopes up.
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