In a story that won't touch football but will have major NCAA implications, word is breaking Tuesday morning that the FBI will charge ten individuals -- four of them college basketball coaches -- with corruption.
The four coaches are:
- Lamont Evans, associate head coach and recruiting coordinator at Oklahoma State
- Chuck Person, associate head coach at Auburn
- Emanuel Richardson, assistant coach at Arizona
- Tony Bland, associate head coach at USC
The others charged include: Other people named in the documents include James Gatto, director of global sports marketing at Adidas; Merl Code, who recently left Nike for Adidas; Christian Dawkins, an NBA agent who was recently fired from ASM Sports for charging approximately $42,000 in Uber charges on a player's credit card; Jonathan Brad Augustine, president of The League Initiative and program director of the Adidas-sponsored 1 Family AAU program; Munish Sood, a financial advisor; and Rishan Michel, former NBA official who founded Thompson Bespoke Clothing, a custom clothier for athletes. The FBI will charge the coaches with accepting money and using their positions as basketball coaches to steer players toward a specific agency. The FBI will also charge a current Adidas executive and a former Nike executive with paying high school athletes in order to secure their commitments to represent the brand when the players turn pro.
This is a breaking news story and we'll have more as this develops.