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Article snippet: At one major university, a sports agent arranged for a quid pro quo among Adidas, the college’s men’s basketball program and a top high school prospect in which the player’s family would receive $100,000 if he committed to the school and signed with the apparel giant once he turned pro. At another college, the basketball team’s associate head coach accepted nearly $100,000 to steer his team’s top players to a financial adviser eager to manage their future N.B.A. riches. At a third, a top assistant set up a similar arrangement, promising to trade his access to players for bribes. “Some of it can’t be completely accounted for on paper,” the sports agent said in urging discretion about one of the deals, “because some of it is, whatever you want to call it, illegal.” These and many more allegations were revealed in a series of complaints made public by federal investigators in New York on Tuesday. The complaints depict a thriving black market for teenage athletes, one in which coaches, agents, financial advisers and shoe company employees trade on the trust of players and exploit their inability to be openly compensated because of N.C.A.A. amateurism rules. College basketball has a long, baroque history of malfeasance involving under-the-table deals, but rarely, if ever, have federal investigators exposed such widespread corruption. The closest analogue is probably the point-shaving scandals of the early 1950s, said Rodney K. Smith, a law professor who has studied th... Link to the full article to read more