In 2013, the Louisville Cardinals won the NCAA Tournament, but the Cardinals will not be competing in the 2016 Tournament because of a self-imposed ban relating to a recent investigation into a recruiting scandal involving escorts and strippers. The scandal involves their assistant coach, Andre McGee, paying an escort to have dancers show up at a Louisville and dance for possible recruits and other basketball players. Katina Powell, the escort McGee is alleged to have paid, has written a book saying that she was providing dancers to McGee from 2010 to 2014. McGee is not working at Louisville for the time being.
ESPN’s Outside the Lines broke the story and now there has been an NCAA investigation that Rick Pitino, Louisville’s basketball coach, has said will not end until possibly July. The story originally came to light when Powell wrote a book called Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen, which was about sending dancers to Louisville’s Billy Minardi Hall, a dorm room where basketball players and other athletes of Louisville University live.
Outside the Lines also interviewed five former Louisville basketball players that chose to remain anonymous, but did say that at Minardi Hall prostitutes would show up and dance for them. In return the players would throw dollar bills at their feet while they were dancing. Three of the players were recruits at the time of the event and would later become players for Louisville’s basketball team.
Outside the Lines and ESPN also talked to Katina Powell about sending the dancers to Bill Minardi Hall. She said that McGee paid her $10,000 to send women for these events. She also said that in the four years she sent over two dozen dancers. After the first couple of events, McGee asked if he could pay extra for the dancers to also have sex with players or recruits. Powell said yes and that strippers having sex with the recruits would usually cost an extra $100 per person.
Also in Powell’s journals she writes about meeting McGee through a mutual friend, that she was paid by McGee and that she was sending dancers to Billy Minardi Hall. The journals not only included information on the scandal, but personal things about Powell. The journals clearly were not written for the purpose of tarnishing the school but just to keep entries on her life. She did find it important to note the scandal because she thought no one would believe her without proof. The NCAA is doing its own investigation into the matter and has not disclosed anything it has found about Louisville or Rick Pitino and will not until the investigation is over.
As for Rick Pitino, he says that he knew nothing about the dancers or sex with recruits and stands by his word. Players that used to play for Rick Pitino say that they believe him, but there are some players that had no comment on the matter when asked about the strippers in Billy Minardi Hall. Pitino has told Louisville fans that he will not be stepping down from his coaching job right now. However, after talking with James R. Ramsey, the President of the University of Louisville, and Tom Jurich, Cardinals athletic director, Louisville chose impose its own postseason ban, not playing in the 2016 NCAA Tournament or ACC Tournament. Some believe that Louisville is creating this ban in order to get a smaller punishment from the NCAA.
Today, recruiting is a difficult process, nothing like signing a free agent in a major sport. Instead, a college is attempting to choose the best athletes from the country and is giving them a scholarship to play. Instead of competing with 30 other teams and having a set cap price to spend, universities are competing with hundreds of other schools to get any athletes they want. The problem is that, although it seems all the schools are going to be competing with each other, really only the top schools compete for the best players.
Each school has a different set number of full or partial scholarships they can give out. Immediately, players who may not be able to afford college have to settle with the schools that are going to be giving out full scholarships. Also, big name schools tend to get first picks on which players they want because going to a school such as University of North Carolina or University of Louisville can give a player a much better chance of making professional leagues such as, in the case of Louisville, the National Basketball Association. If the allegations are true, then McGee may have felt that he could get some type of advantage for the school if he provided recruits with dancers, strippers, and more.
Obviously there will be no word on whether the allegations are true until the NCAA has made a decision, but with the amount of evidence against Louisville and the school choosing to pull themselves out of the NCAA Basketball Tournament, when they were a favorite to be in the Final Four and even the championship game, it is pretty clear to me that they feel that there will be a severe punishment. •
