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Originally Posted by Brutus the Pimp
By the way... I used to cover this stuff for a living. A lot of people I know say this is no shock to coaches and people behind the scenes. This isn't some conspiracy to get Kanter's eligibility taken away. This isn't some jaded former coach sticking it to Kanter. This isn't some misreporting gone bad. It's common place for those types of kids to get paid over in Europe. That's the lay of the land. In fact, it's rare that a kid didn't get paid.
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European basketball makes Division I ball look pristine. From 13 and 14 years old, kids are sold into a weird kind of relationship, where teams have all the power. They take kids from all over the country, pay for room, board, and "incidentals", then practice for hours a day.
When the kids get good enough to garner interest, they play them in leagues with professionals, thereby screwing their college eligibility. That way, the NBA is pretty much the only option and teams then get paid back a pretty substantial sum.
That said, America's private school athletic scholarships are suspiciously similar to this. I always wanted to do an expose on, say, a Trinity or an Oak Hill or a Mater Dei (Maryland) or a St. Anthony's (NJ) and see the books. A private school education helps both kid and school. After all, that education will always be a solid bedrock of information, no matter if the kid goes on to the NBA or an MBA.
But I question how much education really goes on at Oak Hill, where kids travel all over the country nine months out of a year. How many of these schools really teach reading, writing, and arithmetic rather than rebounding, reverse pivots, and roll with the pick?
It's all degrees of filth, in the end. Major public high school programs might give a kid some extra help with tutoring and swag. Private schools offer up $30,000 a year in education benefits and swag, and colleges... Well, it's a billion dollar industry, folks. What would you pay for LeBron?