It turns out that, perhaps, President Donald Trump need not be looking over his shoulder at the FBI after all.
Not when it seems the feds are up to their elbows in rooting out the seamy underside of college athletics. A herculean, 24/7 task to be sure as we are learning by the day.
Who knew the Justice Department even had a college sports department? One that, unlike the inert NCAA, is willing to hold its nose and dive into the widening cesspool.
If they aren’t wiretapping basketball coaches, getting shoe dealers to squeal or busting middle men for sliding under-the-table money to top college prospects, the FBI agents are right here, in Waikiki, arresting a legendary college water polo coach alleged to have been a cog in a college admissions scandal code-named “Operation Varsity Blues.”
Jovan Vavic, whose No. 1-ranked USC women’s water polo team is scheduled to go for 20-0 Saturday against the University of Hawaii, probably won’t be in attendance at the Duke Kahanamoku Aquatic Complex.
The man dubbed the “Pac-12 Coach of the Century,” with 16 national championships, was arrested Tuesday as part a wide-ranging investigation that resulted in charges against 50 people across six states, also touching on UCLA, Stanford, Yale, Wake Forest, Texas, the University of San Diego and Georgetown and college administrators and coaches for water polo, sailing and volleyball.
While most college athletics scandals these days focus on basketball and football, the most lucrative of sports, we probably shouldn’t be surprised at the breadth of the impropriety, the brazen ingenuity or the depth of corruption extending to the so-called “Olympic sports.”
College athletics is big business, after all. Bigger by the year, even in sports you don’t see on ESPN.
Whether it is getting prized, four-star recruits to attend your school to help fill the stadiums and arenas, attract a TV audience and induce donations from proud alums, somebody is getting paid. Somebody always has a hand out or is running a back-door scheme, as cases as fresh as last week remind us.
Tuesday, though, brought new revelations that some coaches and administrators got paid even when the prospective recruits aren’t players at all. Just kids with lagging grades or test scores whose rich or famous parents, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin and a fashion designer, wanted to slide them in prestigious schools on a dodge.
Because athletes can receive preferential treatment in admission despite less impressive academic credentials, this was the avenue to sneak them in, for a price.
Once in, it isn’t known if they were also going to take the less rigorous classes that some schools offer their athletes. Something of a dodge unto itself.
Vavic, according to the charges, is alleged to have received more than $250,000 for his part in certifying the applicants as athletes proficient in water polo. One of his bosses, Donna Heinel, senior associate athletic director at USC, is alleged to have received more than $1.3 million. Both were fired, the school said. Two former USC soccer coaches were also charged.
While it is one more black eye for the well-pummeled image of college athletics, the real losers are the genuinely qualified students who deserved admission but were denied by the new level of corruption.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
