College Football's Criminals: The Agents and the Boosters

As my avid readers are no doubt aware, the NCAA has been flexing ‘ceps all over the country.

First, they dropped the hammer on USC for their assorted misdeeds. To quote the illustrious wisdom of my brother: F those guys.

Now, they’re apparently touring ol’ Dixie, making stops in Alabama and Florida as well as North Carolina.

We’ve got agents taking players to parties, giving them huge sums of cash, cars, and homes, and we end up with universities suffering the consequences of actions they couldn’t reasonably control or foresee. Except for USC. F those guys.

Then we’ve got the likes of Nick Saban, amongst other clowns, bandying about ridiculousness about greedy agents and clamoring for criminal charges against these agents. While there’s good law for that, it’s still not going to really happen. What’s more is that assorted message board fools are insinuating that the athletes should be prosecuted for fraud amongst other things.

What I’m going to try to do here is take a hard look at the legal and practical dynamics of the situation. We’ll be looking briefly at illicit sales operations and tactics (drug dealing) and its ramifications on the situation, the application of the Sports Agent Responsibility and Trust Act of 2004 (SPARTA) and the Uniform Athlete Agent Act (UAAA), and upon whom blame and responsibility for this epidemic should be placed.

First of all, even the most mildly sophisticated crime operations have figured out the concept of compartmentalization. If your illicit product is in one set of hands, the payment for said product goes through someone else’s hands.

Buyer drives to a street corner and hands $200 to A. A takes the money and sends Buyer down the street. A sends a text message on an untraceable prepaid cell phone (available at your neighborhood Wal-Mart!) to C indicating the type and quantity of the product in some sort of simple code that leaves reasonable doubt if the phone is seized by police, such as “14 Avarice St,” meaning 1/4 oz, Ice (meth or cocaine, depending on the neighborhood). Buyer takes drugs from C.

The solution to breaking that chain is easier said than done.

Imagine the police work and the investigation necessary to put together your chain of operations and command in this situation.

Why do we need to address this? Because even the crappy agents have already figured this concept out. It’s called a “runner.” With modern technology, you can get prepaid debit cards with cash and no ID and have the athlete dispose of the evidence, which wouldn’t connect to you or anyone else via paper trail.

Very simple.

What’s more is that by labeling yourself as a “marketer” and limiting your role, not an “agent,” you can effectively avoid the prohibitions of the relevant laws.

Speaking of the devil in the details, let’s get to the issue of SPARTA and UAAA.

SPARTA is the federal statute governing the actions of sports agents. SPARTA provides for three specific duties.

First, it provides for a duty to be truthful. I’m going to give my fair readers a moment to get the belly laughs out. We all good? Okay. This duty boils down to two fundamental prohibitions. An agent must not give a student-athlete false or misleading information, and an agent must not make a false promise or representation to a student-athlete.

For instance, if someone trying to get Ryan Broyles to leave early told him he had five teams who will be drafting in the top 15 of the 2011 draft say they would take Broyles over all others, and Broyles did leave early based on that only to get drafted in the third round...that would be a violation of the duty to be truthful.

The next duty SPARTA demands is the duty of disclosure insofar as NCAA eligibility is concerned. This one’s so simple even Vince Young understands it. Any agency contract with a student-athlete requires the contract to say in a clear and obvious location and manner something along the lines of: You sign with an agent, and you’re no longer eligible to participate in NCAA functions anymore.

The final, and most relevant, duty is the duty to refrain from providing financial inducements to student-athletes. Again, this one boils down very simply. Until a student-athlete actually signs an agency contract, agents are to refrain from giving the student-athlete any cash, gifts, or other incentives of tangible value. Once again, I’m going to give you all the chance to get out a good belly laugh.

Now that we’ve gotten through the duties, let’s look at the hole in SPARTA’s defense. Whatever Leonidas thought this one up apparently didn’t have a Thermopylae to fall back on. The enforcement is provided not by some 300 of the world’s most elite soldiers, but by either the Federal Trade Commission or the state’s Attorney General’s offices.

Not like those guys don’t have way more important things to do.

The problem is that situations at OU and USC have proven definitively the expansive and expensive scope and manpower necessary to effectively enforce amateurism regulations like those in SPARTA. OU had to expand its compliance staff and regulations significantly.

USC had to hire an additional person to bring their compliance staff up to a total of two. F those guys.

If SPARTA is geared more towards the agent-athlete relationship, the UAAA is geared more toward the harm to the educational institutions. While the UAAA reinforces and restates the duties created by SPARTA, and SPARTA does in fact endorse adoption of the UAAA by each state, the UAAA is different in two very specific ways.

First, the UAAA requires any agent with a minimum number of contacts in a state to register with that state as a sports agent. Failure to register can result in civil and criminal penalties (theoretically). Of course, this requires law enforcement agencies to give a damn. Which they don’t.

Why not? The jail population in states like Texas and California is presently so overcrowded that offenders jailed on minor, non-violent charges and civil contempt actions are currently serving about one-fourth or less of their required sentences.

Fines under the current FTC Act are $11k per violation. No. 24 pick Dez Bryant’s contract was worth $8.5 million guaranteed. What’s 10 percent of that?

More importantly, the UAAA gives a specific cause of action (i.e. justification to file suit) to educational institutions against agents who are in violation of the UAAA where such a violation causes harm to the institution (vis a vis NCAA penalties and sanctions).

This is the real power of the UAAA. When you’ve got agent wannabes making half a million dollars off their NCAA violations, and an institution loses millions between the donations and the NCAA sanctions of revenue, those agents fearing suit from the universities they harm is a solid deterrent. Maybe not solid enough, you know.

So, where are the holes in the UAAA? Similar to SPARTA, the UAAA relies heavily for criminal prosecution on local and state law enforcement to give a shit. Right now, if you see a major state law enforcement organization pissing away valuable resources in a recession-driven economic and political climate, you’re looking at people desperate to win public favor who don’t have any.

Also similar to SPARTA, there’s a major hole in the fact that both require the actor in question to be, by definition, an “agent.” This doesn’t cover guys like (Chaz) Michael Michaels and Lloyd Lake.

The only way laws like these will work is if there’s a combination of public outcry, danger of severe harm to the university that evinces a sharp response by the university itself, and media indignation. We’re currently seeing a perfect storm of these three in the wake of the Reggie Bush fiasco. Universities who once thought the NCAA was toothless are now deeply afraid of watching their programs get hobbled for a decade. So the states are starting to get motivated.

This brings me to the biggest issue with SPARTA and UAAA: The student-athletes have no tools of self-defense. The universities have a cause of action. The state and federal governments have criminal charges they can press. But what can a student-athlete do when he’s genuinely trying to play by the rules? What happens to a student-athlete who gets hustled into declaring early?

Remember Jimmy Wilkerson? What if the UAAA had given him an individual cause of action with statutory damages totaling a minimum of $500,000?

Also, the states could expand the definition of “agent” to include cling-ons like Lake and Michaels and those types. If the crime is going outside of the law, then reshape the law to fit the crime.

Now that we know who the players are and what the playbook is, all that remains is to determine who’s responsible for busted plays. In my opinion, the group best suited to that end is the NFL Players Association.

If the endgame for all of these types is to make money on student-athletes as soon as they go professional, then the gatekeepers of the players' union are those with the most control. As a professional organization, the NFL has full authority to self-regulate as it sees fit. If the NFLPA decided to instigate suspensions or outright bans for offending agents, you’d see this sort of behavior come to a screeching halt.

Alternatively, we could rely on agents to police themselves...

From the FanTake blog: Boomer & Sooner

Follow on Twitter: BoomAndSoon