Yesterday, in an outcome that basically nobody reporting on it predicted, two Adidas executives and an agent were found guilty of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in a scheme to pay basketball recruits to attend schools that have apparel contracts with Adidas. Wait, what?
Yeah, that’s right. While basically every national college basketball writer and especially writers who cover recruiting was telling you that this is no big deal and this is more or less how things work in the world of AAU (I’m sorry, “grassroots”) basketball and college basketball recruiting, a jury of 12 people decided that what they did was, in fact, a crime and should be punished by prison time.