Many sports fans last week seemed surprised and upset when news broke of the most recent college basketball scandal.
People who follow it have speculated for years whether the fact that the NCAA allows shoe companies to recruit players for colleges would ever become an issue. Last week, the FBI announced it had uncovered a network of decades of shoe company payoffs that essentially channel certain elite players to certain elite schools.
Elite college basketball programs? If you follow the sport, you know who they are.
The disillusionment in this case isn’t just that shoe companies pay off summer league and travel team AAU coaches with enough cash to lure their top players to colleges with contracts connecting them to those same sneaker suppliers.