Kansas Ticket Scandal: Just The Tip of The Iceberg?

There are impromptu ticket audits being held across the country today.

I wonder if Mario Chalmers’ dad, hired to be Director of Basketball Operations at KU — a $70k per year post — should have put a stop to this all. I mean he was the Director of Basketball Operations during Mario’s time at KU. I guess this will be the last time KU goes all the way to Alaska to fill an important post such as Director of Basketball Operations?

…the Williams Educational Fund in 2004, which is the primary venue that Kansas boosters use to contribute money to the athletic department and acquire basketball tickets.

Greatness.

those teams financed by the Pump brothers have featured at least nine players who went on to play for the Jayhawks.

3 of those players were on the local Kansas City team I believe. I understand Jason King was trying to stir the pot a bit but he left holes. King tries to make it sound like the Pumps were funneling players to Kansas, but how many teams did they fund? I’d be willing to bet that KU missed out on more players from teams funded by the Pumps then the number of players who signed.

King also tries to make it seem like this is directly associated with the basketball program. It’s not, it’s associated with the Williams Education Fund.

Don’t stop,
Believing
Hold on to that feeling
Don’t stop,
Belie

Triston – Shed some light on the Williams Education Fund for us.

Needs to do an article on Jazzy Hartwell, Darrel Arthur, and KU

Williams Education Fund is a booster program. If you donate to the program it’s like donating to the athletic department. When it comes to tickets for athletic events, they’re all pretty much priced the same. So, to determine who gets the better seats, they see how much you donated. The more you give, the better you sit. They’re really the ones who handle the actual tickets and not so much the athletic department themselves. Though, they are obviously affiliated with eachother.

That sounds very much like the 12th Man Foundation. And make no mistake – playing financial footsie with the 12th Man Foundation is the same thing as playing it with the Athletic Department (in the eyes of the NCAA).

When is the NCAA going to clean up basketball? Oh – how about never? Does never work for you?

Somewhere buried in all this is the fact that an online outlet is consistently breaking these scandals.

Keaton always said, “I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of him.” Well I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Yahoo!

I believe the WEF is KU’s equivalent of the Longhorn Foundation at UT or the 12th Man Foundation at aTm, as Ag_in_TX alluded.

Triston,

You can conveniently separate WEF from the AD all you want, but the odds are that Perkins knew about this and turned a blind eye once he saw the surplus revenue knowing the connection was tenuous and could pass it off as an auditing mistake.

And there are plenty of shade dudes involved to take the brunt of the punishment.

This is probably happening at 15+ major universities, KU was just the first domino.

Pond scum like the Pump twins are exhibit A as to why no one really wants to take a very close look at any of the top D-1 basketball programs.

You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

Vash, I know the two go hand in hand, but why would Perkins turn a blind eye? There wasn’t surplus revenue to the program. It ended up costing the athletic program millions in revenue they missed out on. And I’m not saying the athletic department isn’t at least partially at fault. But I do believe their biggest fault was ignorrance in not seeing it happen.

Vash, I know the two go hand in hand, but why would Perkins turn a blind eye? There wasn’t surplus revenue to the program

Are we sure about that yet?

Blue Chips ain’t got nothing on the real thing.

Seriously. The complexity of today’s profit taking and scandals is truly impressive. Goldman could learn a thing or two.

Vash – Yes, we’re sure about that.

It would be hilarious if the entire KU bb program was dirty.

Hip Hop, What he is saying is that it would be fairly stupid not to see this happening if you are the AD. You either have to not be paying any attention to ticket prices, or it must benefit you in some way. Since we all know that poor athletes never accept a couple grand to go to a camp or a nice car for the folks to go to a school, then we can assume it is just stupidity… oh wait. What’s that you say, it is rampant in college basketball? Where is World Wide Wes, he always makes it sound like paying college guys is better for them.

No wonder my seats always suck at away games and bowls.

These folks only think they got problems. I’d be more than a bit surprised if all that ticket income was finding its way on to the employees’ tax returns.

I always found it funny that when I attended the Big XII BB tourney I had lower level seats and my KU buddies were all in nosebleed upper deck sections. I knew I belonged in good seats ‘cause I donated a nice sum annually to A&M through the 12thMF and there wasn’t a huge basketball demand amongst our fans to go to KC. What I didn’t know (nor them either) that it didn’t matter what they donated because their best seats were spoken for already.

Wonder how desirable KU would be considered in conference realignment if they bring NCAA sanctions along with them?

It is impossible to look at that pic of the Pumps and not immediately think ‘skeezy’.

blackscholes said:
May 27th, 2010 at 3:46 pm
It is impossible to look at that pic of the Pumps and not immediately think ’skeezy’

My first thought was, “Oh, look. How cute. A matching pair of douchebags.”

until i read the cutline, i thought this was about the pelini bros.

Surely you see that symbolism. Pump 1 holding the NCAA ball in the palm of his hand.

Dana’s the cute one.

A 1976 KU graduate, along with his wife, Mary, Don Lamb is rethinking his commitment to buying season tickets and making the drives to Lawrence for games.

    “Good tickets are getting harder and harder to get. That’s what angers me,” Lamb said. “I know it’s about money. Every year they want you to give more and more, and even though you give more, your seats don’t improve.”

That’s from BON. My first thought: let the lawsuits commence.

lawdog13 nailed it:

These folks only think they got problems. I’d be more than a bit surprised if all that ticket income was finding its way on to the employees’ tax returns.

IRS > NCAA

parlin/lawdog – That’s exactly right. And that’s what I’ve been saying fromt he beginning – KU lost out on some revenue and is going through some public embarassment – but all of these individuals are the ones who are really going to be in trouble. Unreported income doesn’t go over too lightly, I’m told.

Tucker – I know what he’s saying. What I’m saying is that when you’ve got $80-90 million/year coming in from a variety of sources, tickets being one of them, that it’s possible to miss $1-3mm over the course of five years. It seems ridiculous and in no way am I defending the lack of safeguards in place to guard against this – but it is plenty possible, and a good lesson for all of us to not trust OU grads.

If, in fact, there were numerous complaints/inquiries by donors about their seats, and why so and so was in front of them to KU, etc…and KU did nothing to investigate these claims, then this thing is going to get real messy. You can almost bet that a class-action lawsuit is going to come up and if they can prove that KU either knew, or turned a blind eye, to these infractions, this will not end happily (for KU).

the only thing that scares me is Yahoo!

Scares you? It apparently gives Jim Calhoun heart problems:

UConn, Calhoun cited for 8 violations

The NCAA is only weak in its ability to investigate. Sure, they may also have no balls when it comes to going after people, but on paper the NCAA can wreck shop on member institutions if they want to.

Where this case is different from Big Red Auto or Reggie Bush is that in those cases, the courts weren’t involved so the NCAA couldn’t get a hold of any good evidence. If they have the courts doing all the discovery for them, the NCAA will then have quite a lot to work with.

Whether they choose to or not is a different story.

Of course it wouldn’t be a scandal if OU wasn’t involved.

Did they change their name from ‘Pumpinelli’? That’s a couple of goodfellas right there.

I watched the presser on this— it may still be available online at kusports.com. A few notes from a Jayhawks fan:

This is a HUGE black eye to the University, but let me give you some frame of reference here. Many of these issues started before Lew Perkins came to town. This started in the days when our compliance department was practically non-existent and when our AD was actually quoted saying ‘compliance doesn’t sell tickets’. Lew has beefed up our compliance department and has been extremely open with the NCAA. We’ve also opened our books to some of the best independent auditors in the country. I’m not trying to be an apologist here, but this scandal was brewing before he got here and fooled some of the best accountants in the world.

I think the University responded in the only way it could— it launched a third party investigation (which it released to the public), is giving their full cooperation to Federal investigators and is going to put more controls/separation of duties in place (including an independent forensic accountant). The people who are going to burn for this are going to be the individuals, assuming the Feds don’t find out more with their power to subpoena. None of this excuses either Perkins or the University for not scrutinizing their ticket department in light of some of the donor complaints over the years.

I think that the poster that said that this is the first domino is correct. During the presser, Perkins made mention to other AD’s asking about the methodology KU had been using during their internal investigation. The organizers of this ticket scalping ring (the Pump Brothers), have their fingers in a lot of pies and have friends in many athletic departments. Personally, I’m glad the Feds are going after these guys— I’m growing tired of the NCAA’s lack of teeth.

The Pump’s books are going to be opened for public scrutiny— Freeman’s testimony alone is a smoking gun and the Feds have something like a 90-95% conviction rate. It’s going to be like a Rosetta stone for how AAU organizers, handlers, shoe jockeys and ‘mentors’ operate.

I’m going to be honest; the Pump’s connection to so many KU athletes scares me— especially when SOOOOO much unaccounted cash was floating around. It should be interesting to see how the NCAA handles this. The AAU/sneaker recruitment scene is something that they’ve turned a blind eye to for years and it brings into question whether the NCAA can/should be getting in between these athletes and these sponsors. There isn’t one program around that doesn’t swim in this grimy AAU pool.
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Ok, Northwestern is probably clean.

The ripple effect begins:

http://www2.kusports.com/news/2010/may/28/ku-scandal-prompts-universities-look-ticket-rules/

I would hate to see Perkins lose his job over this, as he has done much to make KU football competitive with the North teams. However, hiring those cheating, thieving cretins from OU displays an appalling absence of judgement and sense of history. I have no doubt that similar scandalous behavior goes on at OU. Whether it sees the light of day is another matter.

Is this blog some sort of an elaborate set-up? A warning?

Its almost like a crystal ball! Sheesh! But you don’t want to give away the ending because then the outcome will ultimately be ruined. To the crooked NCAA: “Stay doggie, stay…good boy.”

Just keep telling yourself…the FBI/CSIS is your friend.

The feds didn’t know anything about this until the end of 2008. KU had its own top secret investigations look into these shananigans in 2001. that is why all this is so shocking.