The dirtiness of D-1

Need a reminder of how corrupted Division I college athletics can be?

Didn’t think so.

But you got a few the last few days, beginning in Lawrence, Kan., where the University of Kansas disclosed that five staffers — since fired — and a former “consultant” scalped football and basketball tickets to Memorial Stadium and Allen Fieldhouse to the tune of more than $1 million between 2005 and this year.

The staffers included Kansas’ former associate athletic director for development, a former assistant athletics director, and two former ticket directors.

The Kansas report, prepared by a Wichita law firm, apparently is only the top layer of dirt.

The same day the KU report was released, Yahoo! Sports claimed that former ticket manager Rodney Jones and Roger Morningstar — a former Kansas player and father of current Jayhawk Brady Morningstar — made more than $800,000 in a 2002-03 ticket-scalping scam involving NCAA Tournament and Big 12 Tournament tickets.

Neither these charges, being probed by the FBI and the IRS, nor the KU probe were triggered by any clever detective work or an alert eye at the university, but by whistleblower David Freeman, a real-estate developer who says he was a part of the scheme. As was, he said, a pair of brothers named David and Dana Pump, and here’s where the story gets even more troubling.

The Yahoo! story described the Pumps as “college basketball power brokers.” What does that mean? It means the Pumps live and feed on the underbelly of Division I basketball. They run AAU teams and summer camps, and have great influence over where a lot of the top high school talent winds up. That gives them leverage with top college coaches and athletic directors, connections that translate to a large number of Final Four tickets, which are then scalped, something they have never denied.

The Pump brothers are certainly connected with the KU program, nine players from their summer traveling teams having gone on to play for Kansas. There are other ties as well, including the fact that the sons of head coach Bill Self and assistant coach Danny Manning are on rosters of the Pump brothers’ teams.

What's the old dictum from Watergate? Follow the money. D-1's corollary: Follow the influence.