List of potential players in college basketball scandal continues to grow

By Matt Tait     Oct 9, 2017

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Team Clutch's Jahvon Quinerly #4 in action against Team Drive in the Under Armour Elite 24 game on Saturday, August 20, 2016 in Brooklyn, NY. (AP Photo/Gregory Payan)

This is how it starts.

[An ESPN.com report from Jeff Borzello, dated Oct. 7,][1] indicates that five-star, Class of 2018 prospect Jahvon Quinerly, who currently is committed to Arizona, has hired a lawyer in response to the FBI investigation into corruption in college basketball.

According to Borzello, Quinerly, who was briefly recruited by Kansas — KU offered Quinerly a scholarship in August of 2016 and continued to recruit him through April of 2017 — has not been contacted by federal agents and it is important to note that there was nothing in the FBI’s initial findings directly linking the five-star point guard to any wrong-doing.

But the mere fact that he and his family feel the need to hire legal representation shows you, yet again, just how serious this thing could get.

Picture this: Here’s a young man on the brink of his senior season of high school basketball who just committed to Arizona after being wooed by some of the biggest and baddest college basketball programs in the land. Quinerly should be having the time of his life. Instead, he has hired a lawyer and is reading things with his name attached to them that reference the potential for him to miss some or even all of his freshman season of college ball if there’s even so much as the smallest link between him and the corruption that already took down Arizona assistant coach Book Richardson.

Talk about scary times.

According to Borzello’s report, Quinerly was recruited by Richardson, one of four assistants at four schools who were named in the initial findings, and investigation documents allege that a $15,000 bribe was paid by Richardson to “Player-5,” who “verbally committed to attending” Arizona “on or about August 9, 2017.”

According to 247 Sports, Quinerly committed to Arizona on Aug. 8.

For now, there is nothing concrete about Quinerly’s involvement in any of this. But the simple act of putting two and two together sure makes it look like there could be something there.

And if there is, you can add another party to the long list of players who have the potential to blow this thing wide open, a list that now includes federal investigators, high school recruits, current college players, former college players, head coaches, assistant coaches, fired coaches, administrators, parents, shoe company executives and more.

I mean, Quinerly might be the absolute best young man in America, but if the feds are able to prove he was involved in this corruption, it’s not hard to imagine the New Jersey point guard sharing everything he knows, good and bad, with eager investigators.

[A New York Post report from Sept. 30][2] tells the story of a father of an unnamed former Louisville standout who claims his son was offered $100,000 “by someone from a rival of Louisville’s,” during his recruitment.

While the identity of that Louisville “rival” certainly is intriguing, it’s hardly the most important part of the story. What is is the fact that this kind of behavior has been going on for some time now (big surprise, right?) and more and more people are slowly starting to tell their stories.

In the New York Post story, the father also claims that “while Adidas had no impact on my son’s decision to go to Louisville, other kids he played with in AAU were definitely led by sneaker companies. I saw it all the time. Their influence runs very deep — especially with families that don’t have means.”

With Twitter messages from national college basketball reporters and even the likes of college hoops guru Dick Vitale starting to surface about the likelihood that more names soon will be implicated in the scandal that could change college basketball forever, it appears as if this story is likely to get more intense as the days go by.

[1]: http://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/20947068/arizona-wildcats-commit-jahvon-quinerly-hires-lawyer-amid-fbi-investigation
[2]: http://nypost.com/2017/09/30/father-of-ex-louisville-star-my-son-was-offered-100k-from-rival/

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Written By Matt Tait

A native of Colorado, Matt moved to Lawrence in 1988 and has been in town ever since. He graduated from Lawrence High in 1996 and the University of Kansas in 2000 with a degree in Journalism. After covering KU sports for the University Daily Kansan and Rivals.com, Matt joined the World Company (and later Ogden Publications) in 2001 and has held several positions with the paper and KUsports.com in the past 20+ years. He became the Journal-World Sports Editor in 2018. Throughout his career, Matt has won several local and national awards from both the Associated Press Sports Editors and the Kansas Press Association. In 2021, he was named the Kansas Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sports Media Association. Matt lives in Lawrence with his wife, Allison, and two daughters, Kate and Molly. When he's not covering KU sports, he likes to spend his time playing basketball and golf, listening to and writing music and traveling the world with friends and family.