tFew things about the bribery scandal that’s racked college basketball over the last two weeks are surprising. This sport’s got a lot of dirty things going on, and the only thing that’s been jarring about it is that it’s the FBI, not the NCAA, cracking down on it.
Louisville’s deal with Adidas was basically just a Rick Pitino deal with Adidas
He made almost all the money on the school’s soon-to-expire deal, a new report says.
Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY Sports
Here’s a hell of a piece of news, though, from the Louisville Courier-Journal:
In fact, under [the University of Louisville’s] current deal with Adidas, which expires July 1, 98 percent of the cash provided by Adidas goes to one person: Rick Pitino, the now-suspended head coach.
In 2015-16, for example, $1.5 million went to Pitino under his personal services agreement with the apparel company while just $25,000 went to the program, according to a contract obtained by the Courier-Journal under the state public records act.
The year before, Pitino also got $1.5 million, while the department banked just $10,000.
That’s 98 percent! Ninety-eight percent of the money Louisville took from a sports apparel giant went to one guy: the head coach who already makes millions of dollars per season and is now suspended pending his termination as a result of this scandal.
Louisville recently announced a new 10-year, $160 million deal with Adidas. The money Pitino’s been getting is not part of that deal, and it appears Louisville’s current contract with Adidas, expiring next year, is a lot smaller. Pitino is not taking 95 percent of that $160 million, as far as we know, and likely wouldn’t even if he weren’t being fired.
Louisville’s defense of the payouts to the coach, per the Courier-Journal:
“Players come here in part because of Coach Pitino. Coaching is part of what we give to student-athletes,” Klein said last month before a bribery scandal prompted the suspensions of Jurich and Pitino.
Klein also noted that Pitino had a contract with Adidas before the program struck its first agreement with the company.
Here’s why this is pretty gross on Louisville’s part:
Every athletic department has an apparel deal with some company or another. The vast majority of major schools are with Nike, Adidas, or Under Armour.
The NCAA doesn’t let schools pay their players, and that’s hard — impossible, even — to defend in sports where those players rake in tens of millions of dollars for the universities. When schools get paid huge sums by multinational sports apparel giants, it makes the “don’t pay players” argument even harder to take seriously.
(Schools can and often do provide players money for certain academic and cost-of-living expenses. That is not the same as compensating them for their job performance.)
“It’s for the athletic department,” Louisville’s now-suspended athletic director, Tom Jurich, once said about the deal, per the Courier-Journal. “It’s for these student-athletes. It’s been earmarked for them.”
That’s the idea schools try to put across, in general: “Yeah, we’re making this boatload of cash and we’re not paying our players, but this money’s really all for them anyway.” The players don’t get money, but they get cool gear that’ll help them look better and play better.
Meanwhile, the actual money was almost exclusively for Pitino.
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