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Sports & Politics Intersect: Arizona stands by their man over alleged FBI wiretap

By Phillip Barnett, Fidel Martinez, Jason Clinkscales | Last updated 3/5/18

"I have never knowingly violated NCAA rules while serving as head coach of this great program." -Sean Miller, University of Arizona basketball head coach

Another week in collegiate sports, another scandal. ESPN broke a story early on Feb. 25 that claims an FBI wiretap has Arizona head coach Sean Miller on the phone with Christian Dawkins about a $100,000 payment to ensure preps prospect Deandre Ayton became a Wildcat.

While these charges would be incredibly damaging for both Arizona and the NCAA at large, there have been questions about the timeline in the ESPN report on when these alleged phone calls actually took place. ESPN made multiple corrections about when the conversations between Miller and Dawkins happened, which has many wondering if the calls even took place to begin with. Miller has gone on record to say that the reports are false and, at the moment, still has support from the university.

Regardless if anything comes from ESPN’s report, the larger story at hand is that the C in NCAA could as easily stand for “corruption” as it does for “collegiate.” Just days before the ESPN story broke, Yahoo Sports reported on documents that showed cash advances and entertainment expenditures for several top high school recruits and college athletes over the last two seasons. There are 25 players across 20 schools that include Duke, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Kentucky, Michigan State, USC and more.

The timing is brutal for the NCAA as it heads into one of the biggest months of the year under the shadow of not only FBI investigations, but criticism from some of the biggest names in basketball, with no less than Pistons head coach Stan Van Gundy calling the NCAA “one of worst organizations,” LeBron James stating it’s a “corrupt” body, ESPN anchor Jay Williams calling on college players to boycott the Final Four. Even Barack Obama put his weight behind the NBA’s G League “so that the NCAA is not serving as a farm system for the NBA with a bunch of kids who are unpaid but are under enormous financial pressure.”

Mark Emmert is saying that the NCAA’s relationship with agents needs to change, but the NCAA couldn’t be further from a solution at the moment. Four assistant coaches were arrested back in September, and with the current FBI probe, there is potential for more charges to come.

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This week in sports and politics history: SMU faces NCAA 'Death Penalty'

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"SMU taught the committee that the death penalty is too much like the nuclear bomb. It's like what happened after we dropped the [atom] bomb in World War II. The results were so catastrophic that now we'll do anything to avoid dropping another one." - John Lombardi, former president of the University of Florida

This week marks the 31st anniversary of Southern Methodist University's football program getting the so-called "death penalty" for repeatedly violating NCAA rules. Specifically, for ignoring those that pertain to not paying athletes.

On Feb. 25, 1987, the NCAA announced that it was canceling SMU's upcoming 1987 season, as well as prohibiting the school from hosting home games for the 1988. The punishment came after it was revealed that 13 SMU players had been paid a combined $61,000 – payments ranged between $50 to $725 a month – from a booster slush fund. Among those contributing to the player pot was none other than two-time Texas governor Bill Clements, an SMU alumnus and former chairman of the school's board.

SMU never really recovered. The school wouldn't make a postseason appearance until 2009, when the Mustangs were invited to play in the Hawai'i Bowl (which they won, beating Nevada 45-10). Once one of the most dominant teams in the historic Southwestern Conference, SMU was excluded from the Big 12 Conference when it formed in 1994, languishing instead in the Western Athletic Conference, Conference USA and, more recently, the American Athletic Conference.

Since then, the NCAA has refused to drop the death penalty on other programs, though it has come close to on multiple occasions (the most notable recent example is Penn State's punishment following the Jerry Sandusky scandal). However, the chances of doing it again seem more likely now that an FBI investigation into college basketball was confirmed by Yahoo Sports.

In 2010, ESPN aired “Pony Excess,” a documentary about the scandal and its aftermath, as part of its Peabody Award-winning “30 for 30” series, proving the lessons from the past still resonate today.

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