College athletics used to have a word for shoe companies paying athletes: Cheating. Now, it’s legit. | Opinion
it was launching a name, image and likeness program accessible to all Division I college athletes at Adidas-affiliated schools, Georgia Tech athletics director Todd Stansbury called it “a perfect example of Adidas’ forward-thinking approach to college athletes.”
And to think, just a few years ago, a lot of folks would have called it something else: A crime.
Remember the FBI investigation into college basketball, which centered in part on Adidas facilitating the recruitment of prospects with illicit payments? As serious as it seemed then, when FBI agents were knocking on doors of college coaches and sweeping through basketball offices, the true legacy of that scandal is how much of a joke it turned out to be.
Aside from sending the already scandal-plagued Louisville program into a tailspin and just recently taking down LSU coach Will Wade, college basketball is basically the same as it ever was. For most of the programs caught up in the investigation, the heavy hand of justice never came.
But four people did get sentenced to jail so the FBI could justify the resources it poured into this investigation. One, Book Richardson, was an assistant coach at Arizona. Two of them, Jim Gatto and Merl Code, were Adidas employees. And then there’s Christian Dawkins, a grassroots basketball middleman who thought he was hustling a broken system when, in fact, he was dealing with undercover FBI agents.
But the biggest thing that’s changed is that the NCAA is now allowing it.
Had the people running college sports figured out years ago that athletes earning money off their name, image and likeness was inevitable, it’s hard to imagine the need for the people running Adidas’ grassroots division to cut under-the-table deals to help Louisville, Kansas and other top-level Adidas schools land the best players.
Now, it will just be done a different way — through tweets and promotional activities that officially stamp the players as Adidas spokespeople. Which has actually been an unofficial thing for a long time in the basketball grassroots system where — surprise, surprise — many of the elite prospects end up at colleges sponsored by the same shoe company that provided travel expenses and gear for their AAU team.
Some people may not like those connections being as in-your-face as they’re now going to be in the shoe company world, but doesn’t that feel like a more honest transaction than the constant suspicion surrounding how so many schools end up with top recruits?
MORE:Adidas announces NIL opportunity for college athletes
WHAT’S NEXT:Arizona flying high to Sweet 16, but NCAA dread lurks in background