Louisville assistant allegedly paid madam to provide sex for players & recruits
The book alleges: “At the peak of the dormitory and off-campus entertainment more than $10,000 cash changed hands to Katina for supplying the women. This does not include the hundreds of one dollar bills thrown at the dancers at each party by McGee, the recruits and players. Nor does it include the money paid to the women who had sex with the recruits afterward. So frequent were the escapades that Katina would later say, especially after the Cardinals won the 2012-2013 NCAA championship: I felt like I was part of the recruitment team. A lot of them players went to Louisville because of me.”
The actions described in the book would appear to be both illegal and in violation of school and NCAA rules. If, as Powell alleges, players who were members of Louisville’s championship team received impermissible benefits that were provided by a staff member, the Cardinals’ title would seemingly be in jeopardy.
Release from book's publisher: http://www.ibj.com/articles/55155-book-louisville-hired-prostitutes-to-woo-basketball-recruits
Could lead to vacating the 2012-2013 NCAA Championship if true. If only that ref had got that clean block right instead of calling a foul on Trey Burke...
October 2nd, 2015 at 6:54 PM ^
This is obviously the only reason UM lost to them. CHEATERS!
October 3rd, 2015 at 9:31 AM ^
...at least it only "appears" to be illegal! That's a relief!
"The actions described in the book would appear to be both illegal and in violation of school and NCAA rules. "
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:01 PM ^
What the hell do you need hookers for when you are a 5-star hoops recruit? I'm about as fetching as your average light post and even I could get a piece in college pretty regularly. If you can ball, all you gotta do is be like "who want to sex [insert name]?" and the bell be ringing.
At least the Fab Five had the decency to lose their title games. What a waste.
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:08 PM ^
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:20 PM ^
Have you been to Louisville?
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:24 PM ^
You could say that. I lived there for 3 years and got my law degree from U of L.
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:34 PM ^
my family is from The Ville...they escaped...JJ
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:37 PM ^
Yeah. It's an okay place to visit, but to live there...not so much.
October 3rd, 2015 at 9:15 AM ^
October 2nd, 2015 at 6:59 PM ^
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:11 PM ^
Breaking Cardinal Rules includes pix of dancers/escorts with players at what author says is #UofL dorm. Here's one. pic.twitter.com/CB2FHk3Yan
— IBJ News (@IBJnews) October 2, 2015October 2nd, 2015 at 8:45 PM ^
It's the Louisville difference
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:00 PM ^
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:05 PM ^
Rick Pitino may want to rethink his choice of words given the current situation. #BBN #UofL #L1C4 pic.twitter.com/CDu8m8cRJ8
— The Irrational Fan (@Irrational_Fan) October 2, 2015October 2nd, 2015 at 7:15 PM ^
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October 2nd, 2015 at 7:18 PM ^
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:41 PM ^
ESPN had it backwards. What Coach was saying is that the recruits didn't get the women to come.
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:05 PM ^
But they are going to scratch Petinos national title tattoo off with a fork, right?
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:08 PM ^
...at all.
Not the way Beilein recruits.
If Louisville recruited clean, they would not have assembled the same talent level. Michigan robbed of a banner.
The surprise is not that Louisville (and lots of other programs) do this. The surprise is that it has gone public.
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:16 PM ^
Louisville has one of the best coaches in the college game, and is a fun city in a basketball-crazy state. I think they could have done fine without the hookers. Guess we'll never know.
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:35 PM ^
But why take the chance when you can be assured of getting the best recruits, right?
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:50 PM ^
with a straight face?
October 2nd, 2015 at 8:12 PM ^
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:55 PM ^
a few prized recruits and there's more temptation to stray from the rules. Especially if you suspect something fishy in how you lost those recruits.
October 2nd, 2015 at 10:52 PM ^
...makes no sense.
1. Sure Louisville would do "fine" without using prostitutes in recruiting. But if they recruited clean they would not have been in the final four. There is a big difference between doing "fine" and making the final.
2. If you don't think that hookers are a big recruiting advantage and that being a nice town and having a good coach will land the exact same set of players, then you are wrong. The reason Louisville used hookers is because it IS a recruiting advtanges. It works. Otherwise, why do it? Why take the risk?
3. In a world with all clean recruiting, Michigan comes out way ahead. Schools with slimy coaches and slimy programs can recruit better than would be the case if they adhere to the rules. Beilein recruits clean, so he is always at a disadvantage compared to schools like Lousville. Sure Beilein gets his share of good players.. But if the cheating could be eliminated, Beilein would do much better.
Same goes for football. Just wait until the Ole' Miss house of cards comes tumbling down.
October 3rd, 2015 at 1:02 AM ^
Second, even if some of the same players wouldn't have gone to Louisville without the hookers, we don't know that Pitino couldn't have filled their spots with equally good players. Similarly, even if we assume that one or more players did sign with Louisville because of the hookers, we also don't know whether those players were major contributors or minor bench guys. If Russ Smith committed to Louisville because of honkers, that's obviously much more significant than somebody like Blackshear. Or, if a guy like Blackshear doesn't go to Louisville because of no hookers, it's likely Louisville fills his spot with somebody else who is at least comparable.
So yeah, I guess I feel like whatever advantage Louisville might have gotten by using hookers probably was not worth the risk. I think they could have done just as well without them. In fact, it appears possible this scandal was mostly some assistant going rogue--not something Pitino orchestrated or approved; that would seem to at least somewhat support an inference that Pitino himself did not feel that cheating was necessary to succeed at Louisville. But hey, they did use hookers and they did win the National Championship, so how can I argue with that?
October 3rd, 2015 at 2:10 AM ^
October 3rd, 2015 at 10:42 AM ^
October 3rd, 2015 at 7:44 AM ^
The argument that 'well, maybe they would have gotten the same players' and 'Ptino is a great coach so they would have had the same results anyway...' are wrong. There is just no other way to put it
Again, the reason programs break the recruiting rules is that they know it works. Whether it is hookers or bag men, it works. It substantially changes the probabilities of reelinng in the players that make a difference.
A great coach with one less stater (becasue that guy went to a bagmen/hookers program) makes the tournament but has a much lower probability of making (and winning) the final than would be the case with the one extra key player.
Especially in basketball, if a team lacks just one of its 5 starters, or even the 6th or 7th man off the bench, the probability of making a deep run in the tournament drops off a cliff.
October 3rd, 2015 at 10:37 AM ^
We can also agree that hookers and bag men improve a team's chances of signing good players. So if you have hookers and bag men, your probability of signing good players (and, thus, of winning a national championship) tends to increase.
However, every team is limited in the number of players it can sign by the availability of scholarships. No matter how many hookers or bag men you have, you generally cannot sign more than 3-5 players per year.
Now, I postulated that teams with better legitimate selling points (such as quality coaches, tradition, facilities, location/campus environment, etc.) have less to gain by resorting to hookers and bag men, because those teams can likely attract enough (i.e., 3-5 per year) top athletes anyway. I find it very difficult to believe that Rick freaking Pitino wouldn't have been able to find 3-5 good basketball players per year without resorting to hookers, but maybe I'm wrong.
If Pitino would have been able to recruit 3-5 good players per year without hookers, then the only way the hookers could have provided an advantage is if players recruited by hookers are qualitatively better than players recruited without hookers. I guess I just don't believe that, but until someone completes a study into the illicit sexual demands of top-100 basketball recruits, I don't see how,we'd ever know.
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:50 PM ^
Between Trey, Stauskas, THJr., Mitch, and GRIII you have four (4) NBA first round picks and one second rounder. Granted, Stauskas was still just a shell of what he would become and Mitch was a bit raw too but still...Michigan had plenty of talent (including hte best player in the league).
Louisville was stacked too (Dieng may have been the best pro prospect in that game and he played like it), but the game was decided by the referees. Don't blame Beilein's recruiting.
October 2nd, 2015 at 9:38 PM ^
I am blaming Louisville's recruiting. One less key recruit and Lousiville is not even in the final four.
That is just the way basketball works.
One key player is the difference between making the tournament and making the final four.
Not unreasonable to think that hookers and sex parties sealed the deal for at least one key Lousiville recruit on that team.
Beilein took Michigan to the final without breaking the rules.
And yes, I do realize that this sort of thing is not just Louisville. It happens at lots of places. But that just shows that Beilein has done well despite plaing by the rules.
October 2nd, 2015 at 8:08 PM ^
His name is Dick Cady...there is a joke there!
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:09 PM ^
The outside expert is aggressively reviewing this situation in full cooperation with relevant authorities, including the NCAA. The university notes that the publisher has provided sparse detail to date and repeats its request for additional detail in order to further the thoroughness of the investigation.
I can see it now - "You'll like this guy, but he's very demanding - anything you can give him, Coach....video, diagrams, audio tapes, annotated versions of the book, live demonstrations....because he'll want to make a thoroughly informed decision for Louisville."
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:10 PM ^
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:13 PM ^
"The actions described in the book would APPEAR to be in violation of NCAA rules." Um, yeah. But I guess I can understand the author's hestitation given the hooker parties Miami had that resulted in the NCAA handing down jackshit.
October 3rd, 2015 at 9:09 AM ^
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:16 PM ^
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:25 PM ^
October 2nd, 2015 at 10:36 PM ^
Louisville's 11th in all-time wins, one behind Indiana, and that's largely because except for UCLA and North Carolina all of the ten schools ahead of them had a head start of a decade or so. They're 9th in winning percentage--there are only six schools ahead of them in both charts and you can probably name them.
Mississippi football is something like 50th. A better equivalent to Louisville basketball would be USC, if Notre Dame and UCLA were somehow combined into one school to match Kentucky.
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:31 PM ^
"Former recruits and players allege that after games, coaches would provide hookers who offered blow jobs on demand and cocaine snorts off the prostitutes' naked bodies..."
/Allegedly.
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:37 PM ^
October 2nd, 2015 at 8:29 PM ^
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October 2nd, 2015 at 10:01 PM ^
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:21 PM ^
...if this will be the last straw for Julie Herman, the Rutgers AD.
She was at Louisville before Rutgers, and if this happened on her watch at Louisville it might be the last straw for her at Rutgers.
She began at Rutgers very badly and has had continual problems, most recently all of the Rutgers football player arrests and failing to control Kyle Flood's pressuring instuctors to change grades.
Trickly situation for Rutgers, however, as they really don't have the money to fire Flood and pay the buyout/remained of his contract. Might be hard to attract a new AD at Rutgers if he or she/he would be stuck keeping Flood due to economic contraints.
October 2nd, 2015 at 7:29 PM ^
Good point. She was also at Louisville when Pitino got that equipment manager's wife pregnant.
October 2nd, 2015 at 8:48 PM ^
Wasn't Ricky slipping the sausage to some waitress at a local Lville restaurant? I think he was bending her over the salad bar.
October 2nd, 2015 at 10:36 PM ^