The ongoing court proceedings involving the college basketball world can be tedious to follow, particularly in a world in which the payment of “amateur” athletes has never been a more popular concept. However, some stories break through and one came to light from Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports that fits that bill.
In short, Wetzel points out that former Arizona assistant coach Book Richardson, who has been in the midst of the FBI investigation from the beginning, was seemingly spending the lion’s share of his own money in order to lure recruits to the program.
“He was using his personal money to fund his recruiting,” Munish Sood, a financial advisor who was one of Dawkins’ partners, testified on Monday. “Christian (Dawkins) suggested using someone else’s rather than his own money.”
The Yahoo report details that Richardson’s monetary issue was “was what he was spending on recruits, families and handlers so they would sign with Arizona,” even with the caveat that he was making almost $250,000 annually in his position. One such instance of that was Richardson admitting in a meeting that was taped that he “put in $10,000 of (his) own money” in an attempt to land recruit Jahvon Quinerly. Another was a taped conversation in which Richardson said plainly that he paid Rawle Alkins’ cousin “two grand a month.”
Of course, it has to be noted that Richardson could simply have been saying these things without a full-blown basis to do so but, if there is truth to his statements, he would’ve been shilling out a considerable portion of his own pre-taxed salary. The full report from Wetzel is absolutely worth a read for the intricacies involved here but, in the grand scheme, it is wild to imagine that a highly paid Pac-12 assistant would be in legitimate financial peril simply because he chose to invest his own personal funds on the recruiting trail.
