Expert: Basketball powers like Arizona 'make a choice to wade' into murky recruiting waters

As news broke Friday about Sean Miller’s possible involvement in the ongoing pay-for-play recruiting scandal, Arizona Wildcats fans took to social media to try and make sense of it all.

In the middle of the chatter, one recruiting expert said the involvement of agent Christian Dawkins, who has been linked to fired UA assistant Book Richardson and former Wildcats aide Joe Pasternack, was just the tip of the iceberg.

George Dohrmann, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, former investigative reporter for Sports Illustrated, senior editor for The Athletic and author of “Play Their Hearts Out” — a book about AAU basketball and recruiting — spoke to the Star about the broader implications of the FBI investigation and how to improve what appears to be a very broken system.

He talked about Deandre Ayton’s road to college, and the deal that he says major basketball programs make to land top recruits:

You said Saturday that this investigation is only providing a glimpse into the influence of agents in college basketball, and that the situation should be multiplied by 10. Do you think we’ll see any other agencies exposed as a result of the FBI investigation?

A: “Whether those other agencies get roped into this is questionable or doubtful, since the FBI seems to have zeroed in on (Andy) Miller’s agency (ASM). I don’t know if we’re ever going to get other agencies and all the dirt they’re involved in. But I think anyone who’s followed ... basketball understands that Andy Miller’s agency was just one of the agencies that was occupying this space and doing the thing those guys are doing. Some of these players didn’t sign with ASM. Did they suddenly decide some other agency was just a better fit but weren’t getting money from that agency? I find that doubtful. This has been going on for God knows how long. People have written stories and books about agents and runners and how they operate, but this is the first time it’s gotten blown open, because of the FBI involvement. (In the past) we could only write, ‘Hey look, you know, this is happening,’ and it just sort of got ignored or swept under the rug, whereas obviously you can’t ignore the FBI. A federal investigation tends to get a little bigger and draws more attention.”

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Will the investigation will have lasting effects on how college basketball recruits players, or will it just return to business as usual?

A: “I think that’s the way the business is run. This is the way the system is run: AAU coaches have agents that they do business with. Dan Fegan, who passed away tragically recently, had a deal with one of the most prominent AAU coaches, Pat Barrett. It helped him get big time players, like Tyson Chandler. AAU coaches have relationships with agencies, and they give the agencies access to their kids and they push kids toward those agencies. To change this, you can’t change a few little tweaks to the system. You have to blow up the system and say, ‘We’ve got to take AAU basketball out of the equation somehow.’ I wrote a story years and years ago when Lute Olson went down about how (coaches) Miles Simon and Josh Pastner set up a tournament to try to get access to kids. They got busted, the NCAA found out about it (in 2010) and they got in trouble with the NCAA. It all goes back to AAU basketball. If you leave the system in place and still empower AAU coaches, the NCAA can’t do anything about those coaches. If they’re there, if they’re still controlling kids, the way they profit off kids is with shoe company money and agent money, and they will continue to do that.”

Is there an easy fix to the situation, or are we talking about a major change when it comes to recruiting?

A: “They can tweak the one-and-done rule — and that will help, but it will not change agents trying to get in with kids through shoe companies and AAU coaches; that will still be there. But what it might do is prevent schools from getting into these messes. I knew one of Deandre Ayton’s AAU coaches when he was playing basketball, because he bounced around, and I knew one of them. We talked about it and it was a pain in the butt for him, because there were so many people around that kid. And we’re not talking about just his parents or cousins, there were so many hanger-on-ers. There were so many people: Agents, runners, shoe people. And so when you’re Arizona, you inherit that. And if you recruit him, you wade into that. I’m not telling you anything that Sean Miller doesn’t know well; you make a choice to wade into that. If you kill the one-and-done rule, then he (Ayton) isn’t in play, so you don’t have to wade in and Arizona decides to not even get involved in that business. That’ll help them stay out of trouble, because there’s rarely this kind of trouble around three-star players. It’s always the ones that should (eventually) be one-and-done kids anyway.”

So how do you fix it?

A: “College basketball just needs to get completely out of and give up their role as the NBA’s development system. In other sports, there is an alternative development system. In baseball, kids can go play minor league baseball. In soccer — even in our country, which is a young soccer country — kids can go to MLS academies and play there instead of going to play college soccer. In Europe, they all go to academies. No one goes to college to play soccer. So there are professional settings for young players … that kids can go into so they can pursue a professional path outside the university system. The NCAA somehow needs to convince the NBA to do their own developing of players, so that way, someone like Deandre would go right out of high school or even earlier to an NBA academy and he would continue on that path, and he would never see college. And the kids who are not good enough to go stick that out would go on to college to develop further. But colleges are not still then the primary development system. They’re the secondary system. These kids are bought and sold three and four times over by the time they get to college. They’re just biding their time and there’s so much baggage that comes with them that schools shouldn’t want anything to do with them, but of course, you win with these kids. They’re very talented, so you can win games. Even Duke started going to one-and-done because Coach (Mike Krzyzewski) knew that to really win it all, that’s what he needed to do. This is what happens when you take on all that baggage, and they all know it’s there. This is no surprise. Nobody at Arizona should be surprised that when you get a recruit like Deandre, he has agents and runners and things like that in his life.”