Sunday, October 30, 2005

Smoke or Smoke Screen?

The Sports Law Blog recently had an interesting post on a racketeering trial in NYC in which former Pitt star and currently NBA player Mark Blount's name has been mentioned. Click here and read this most interesting post.

Make you wonder whether college basketball, like democracy and sausage, is a wonderful thing, but you don't want to see how it's made. Alternatively, makes you wonder whether the alleged racketeer in question is dropping juicy tidbits to deflect attention off his real problems.

I am sure that as more rocks are overturned and more people are interviewed under oath, more facts will come out. Or not. You'll recall earlier this year that a booster in the Southeastern football part of the world was convicted of paying a high school football coach a nice sum to steer his player to a certain school. We're probably naive if we think that nothing bad goes on and that all players choose their schools because of how their schools will prepare them for life after basketball. We'd probably be accused of being cynical or worse if we believed that everyone got some sort of graft. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, which doesn't mean, though, that we simply can take the two extremes and divide them up by two and come up with an average expectation. My guess is that stuff like this -- which at this point only is alleged -- is a serious exception and not the rule.

Read the Sports Law Blog for more updates.

If I were Mark Blount, I would hire a publicist to field the media's questions.

And it probably wouldn't hurt to hire a good lawyer.

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