The first insistence received that I had to watch "The Scheme,'' the freshly arrived HBO documentary on college basketball corruption, came from my wife. That was quite an endorsement, since in her memory she has never attended a college basketball game.
So, you find out the film revolves around Christian Dawkins, the young guy who took … no, paid … no, was middle man for …. what did he do?
Turns out, what Dawkins did was take the fall, after the FBI and the prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney office for the Southern District of New York decided they weren't all that interested in fully exposing "the dark underbelly of college basketball'' — as the Southern District's Joon Kim had boasted when announcing charges in September 2017.
The FBI looks much worse in the film for being sucked into this by Marty Blazer, a convicted financial fraudster, than does Dawkins.
Christian was 22 and an unknown when he came up with two players, Elfrid Payton and Rodney Hood, in the top 23 of the 2014 NBA draft.
That put him into the big-time of basketball agency, with the task of building a bond with the best AAU players and their families that would survive a college career (preferably short) and have the player sign with Dawkins' agency before the NBA draft.
Dawkins wasn't taking money from college coaches. He was paying money to players, their families and perhaps an AAU coach with long-term influence.
The higher-level the program, the better the chance for a Dawkins player to be taken in the first round.
