Miami Hurricanes Football Scandal? NCAA, You Have a Bigger Problem

Pimping hookers on yachts in South Beach makes Nevin Shapiro and his antics merely a salacious headline du jour.

But there’s a time bomb getting ready to explode about 1,000 miles to the west, and more than a single school’s athletic existence may well be at stake.

A man named David Salinas took his own life in a Houston suburb earlier this summer.

Largely unknown even to most sports fans, Salinas was a big fish in the no longer quite so small pond of AAU youth basketball…the Pipeline, as it’s sometimes called.

Salinas, like many dads, started a team, Houston Select, almost 20 years ago because he had a son who liked to play ball

Before long, Houston Select became one of the two or three elite teams in Greater Houston, and Salinas was overseeing squads at multiple age levels, his own little pipeline, if you will, though hardly an original notion in the cut-throat world of competitive youth sports.

(See, for instance, George Dohrmann’s Play Their Hearts Out on the Southern California youth hoops scene. And if you’re really intrigued, try this old piece form the Houston Press.)

National championships, an impressive alumni list and respect as an insider in the often sordid world of college recruiting earned Salinas the ear and apparently the trust of high salaried coaches and athletes.

His status as a major donor to the athletic programs of both Rice University and the University of Houston enhanced this seemingly admirable reputation.

Squeaky-clean even, a pillar of virtue in a cesspool of vice.

Then why was the Securities and Exchange Commission investigating Salinas and his business entities, particularly the J. David Financial Group?

And what could be at stake here that it would drive a man like David Salinas to suicide?

Investigative reporting by Sports Illustrated and the Houston Chronicle has revealed sizable investments (as much as $2.3 million) in the J. David Financial Group from more than a dozen athletes and college coaches, both high- and low-profile.

Highly paid and respected college coaches, like Texas Tech’s Billy Gillispie, Mark Few of Gonzaga and retired Arizona headman Lute Olson, were seduced by a get-rich-quick scheme, pitched by a guy they thought they could trust that seems to have turned out to be some kind of a swindle.

The money we’re talking about here makes Nevin Shapiro’s perks to the Miami Hurricanes seem like chump change.

The SEC investigation of Salinas and the J. David Financial Group goes on.

Questions, most of them troubling, remain to be addressed:

About Salinas and his motives.

About all these coaches and their motives.

And, finally, about one name that has not surfaced as yet, a name much better known than Salinas in both Houston and national basketball circles.

Abacus sincerely hopes that this Salinas Saga does not take a sharp turn in the direction of Tennessee. (You can go to that Houston Press link above to connect these speculative dots.)

Shapiro can be dismissed fairly easily as the proverbial jock-sniffer.

Not so the late Senor Salinas.