Could Rice report recommendations have prevented alleged NC State, Dennis Smith issues?

A little more than two weeks after federal investigators arrested 10 men, including four coaches, amid an FBI investigation into fraud and corruption in college basketball, the NCAA finalized the formation of a commission to address the problems of an ailing sport. The Commission on College Basketball, as it came to be known, became official with an NCAA press release on Oct. 11 and, in it, Mark Emmert, the NCAA president, spoke with urgency of a need for significant change.

“We must take decisive action,” he said at the time. “This is not a time for half-measures or incremental change.”

What, then, to make of a series of recommendations that don’t address the fundamental problems that led to the creation of the commission in the first place? After almost seven months, the Commission on College Basketball, led by chairwoman Condoleezza Rice, a former secretary of state and former Stanford provost, announced its recommendations on Wednesday in Indianapolis.

It had been a much-anticipated event, one that followed weeks of speculation about what changes might be coming. The short answer: Not much, at least in the way of affecting the problems that led to the commission.

During Rice’s address, which lasted for approximately 30 minutes on Wednesday morning, she dutifully detailed the suggestions for reform that she and the rest of the 14-member commission settled upon after months of conversations, debates and consultations with experts on the world of college basketball. Quickly, though, it became clear that the greatest revelation wasn’t what the Rice Commission included in its report. It’s what it lacked.

And that includes a lack of recommendations that might have prevented the case involving Dennis Smith Jr. and N.C. State. Smith is not named in the FBI’s investigation, but the details of in a recent superseding indictment make clear that an adidas employee and an unnamed N.C. State coach allegedly conspired to pay Smith's father $40,000 to secure his commitment to N.C. State.

The NCAA reached this point of crisis, of seeking “decisive action,” as Emmert put it, because the FBI’s investigation exposed, once and for all, in black and white, the sort of corruption that had long been assumed but rarely proven.

The FBI makes a case that the summer recruiting circuit, which exists in the form of camps and tournaments sponsored by apparel companies Nike, adidas and Under Armour, is corrupt. Indeed, as the September arrest of adidas’ Jim Gatto alleges, shoe company executives conspire with college programs of similar branding to entice recruits, through monetary payments, to choose those schools.

Indeed, sports agents, seeking the next prized client, target players long before they even arrive on a college campus. In some cases, according to the FBI investigation, players could be in line to receive tens of thousands of dollars in loans from such agents.

That these things happen was mostly met with a collective yawn, one that Rice alluded to during her presentation on Wednesday morning. Speaking before NCAA officials and media members, with the other 13 members of the commission seated behind her, Rice spoke defiantly about a system of corruption that has long existed, but one that has rarely been confronted with any kind of success.

She said the kind of behavior that led to calls for change “has too often been ignored and inadequately punished.”

“Throughout our work as a commission,” Rice said, “we heard too many times, ‘Everyone knew what was going on.’”

Following Rice’s observation, the commission’s recommendations are unlikely stop the kind of behavior that “everyone” has long known about. The problems uncovered by the FBI investigation speak to the existence of a black market economy and the monetary value of players who are worth millions, in some cases, but who are also unable to receive so much as a free dinner from an agent – or anyone else, just about – according to NCAA rules.

The closest the Rice Commission came to addressing the root of the problem is in its first recommendation, the one that likely generated the most headlines and attention on Wednesday: the call to eliminate the so-called “one-and-done” rule, which requires players to be a year removed from their high school graduation class before entering the NBA draft. As the commission made clear, that is the NBA’s rule, and only the NBA, and its players association, has the authority to change it.

Clearly, though, Rice and her colleagues view one-and-done talent as corrosive to the college game.

“Elite high school players with NBA prospects and no interest in a college degree should not be ‘forced’ to attend college,” Rice said, reading her report, “often for less than a year. These uniquely talented players are the focus of agents, apparel companies, investment advisers, college coaches and others seeking to profit from their skills and offering them cash and other benefits in hope of future gain.”

The FBI’s case has made all of that clear enough, if it wasn’t already. The subtext of the recommendation to end the one-and-done rule, and allowing players to go from high school to the NBA, is clear enough, too: The committee believes the college game would become “cleaner,” however that’s defined, if the best of the best high school prospects are allowed to bypass college altogether.

It makes some sense, until one realizes just how few players would be able to make such a leap. Marvin Bagley III, the Duke All-American who earned ACC Player of the Year honors last month after his lone college season, is undoubtedly such a talent that didn’t need to spend a season in college. Arizona’s DeAndre Ayton is another, along with Texas’ Mo Bamba.

All three of those players have entered the NBA draft. In a world without the one-and-done rule, all three could have skipped college. But what about the overwhelming majority of prospects who aren’t ready for the NBA as 18-year-olds, but who still might be among a select group coveted by apparel companies, agents and college programs?

The case involving Smith and N.C. State is among those that speaks to why the Rice Commission was formed. It also illustrates the how the commission’s recommendations fall short.

The details that apparently describe Smith's recruitment in the FBI's superseding indictment filed this month illustrate exactly the kind of alleged wrongdoing that Emmert was talking about when he said, in October, that “the culture of silence in college basketball enables bad actors, and we need them out of the game.” The Rice Commission, however, offered little in the way of suggestions to keep such “bad actors” - whether they be corrupt shoe company executives, or shady agents or financial advisers – out of the game.

Nor were there recommendations that addressed the overall shadow economy that has grown out of the NCAA’s insistence on preserving the “collegiate model.” Instead, the Rice Commission, not unexpectedly, framed its recommendations to preserve that model, and passed on the chance to encourage radical reform.

The commission did offer a fresh perspective on enforcing NCAA legislation, and called, in effect, for it to be outsourced – along with the punitive side of enforcement. Rice and her colleagues proposed to revamp the NCAA’s penalty structure, and recommended that infractions cases involving Level I violations, which are the most serious, be subject to five-year postseason bans.

That’s a significant deterrent for wrongdoing, but now the question becomes how, exactly, to stop the kind of activity the FBI exposed. As Rice said, she quickly discovered the perception that “everyone knew” what was happening among shoe companies, agents and some schools, but it took a federal investigation, complete with wiretaps, informants and the raiding of an agent’s business files, to uncover it all. And undoubtedly, what’s been uncovered is only a small glimpse of the complete picture.

Before the commission released its report on Wednesday, the buzzword among leaders in college athletics was that the recommendations would be “substantive.” Some were: if the NBA doesn’t do away with the one-and-done rule, the commission suggested it might consider recommending freshmen ineligibility, for one. The commission also called to allow undrafted players the opportunity to return to college, and it outlined a plan in which players could receive feedback about their pro prospects from agents, who would have to be certified by the NCAA.

The greatest question facing the commission, though, is how it would handle the problems that led to its creation in the first place – those detailed in the FBI probe, and those concerning the suspicion that, in some cases, a player’s services are bought and paid for through the influence of shoe companies and others. It was a question of how the commission would address the sort of under-handed business that allegedly transpired between an N.C. State coach and an adidas employee during Smith’s recruitment.

After all these months came answers, and while some of the commission’s recommendations are sure to change the game, its problems beneath the surface don’t appear too likely to cease.

This story was originally published April 25, 2018 at 5:52 PM with the headline "Could Rice report recommendations have prevented alleged NC State, Dennis Smith issues?."