Sean Miller Among Those Implicated In Latest College Basketball FBI Scandal Report
An FBI wiretap captured a conversation showing Arizona head coach Sean Miller was aware of a $100,000 payment to bring five-star recruit DeAndre Ayton to the Wildcats, according to a report from ESPN.
The conversation was between Miller and Christian Dawkins, who ESPN describes as “a runner working for ASM Sports agent Andy Miller.” During these calls, Sean Miller allegedly directed Dawkins to discuss payments with former assistant Emmanuel Richardson.
This story was just the latest bombshell in a day filled with news reports, beginning with an in-depth story from Yahoo! Sports on Friday morning.
Another story from Yahoo!, which dropped around the same time as ESPN’s report on Miller, details a series of emails between Dawkins and Andy Miller. Those emails outlined what Yahoo! called “a diary of the basketball black market.”
There are basketball figures from every level in the documents: Meetings with Nick Stapleton (“Trainer of Collin Sexton, the best rising Sr. PG in America”), Johnnie Parker (“handler of Chimezie Metu”) and financial maven Rudy Cline-Thomas (“He has a close relationship with Festus Ezeli, who may be firing [agent Bill] Duffy”).
Dawkins, 24, provides a roadmap for the quid-pro-quo relationship between the agent world and college coaches. He dangles a high school prospect – five-star recruit Brian Bowen – as potential trade bait for schools to steer their best players to ASM Sports. On the same July day, Dawkins wrote to Miller that he connected with two Big Ten assistants, Dwayne Stephens of Michigan State and Chuck Martin, formerly of Indiana.
