RALEIGH, N.C. _ When the FBI announced an updated indictment in its college basketball investigation on Tuesday, it added a former N.C. State player to its ongoing case, alleging that a $40,000 payment was made by a sneaker company through a Wolfpack coach to retain a star recruit who was thinking of leaving the program. The athlete appeared to be one-and-done guard Dennis Smith Jr.
The updated indictment came nearly two months after a Yahoo Sports report that cited FBI documents showing Smith, a star guard from Fayetteville drafted by the Dallas Mavericks last year, received $73,500 in loans from sports agency ASM, owned by prominent agent Andy Miller.
Other players, including Wendell Carter Jr., Tony Bradley and Kevin Knox, who played for Duke, UNC and Kentucky respectively, were also listed in the Yahoo report in connection with smaller issues involving contacts between their families and Christian Dawkins, a former associate of Miller. None of the players have faced eligibility problems from the NCAA.
Basketball officials at all of the schools involved said they were unaware of their players' contacts with Miller or Dawkins, who was arrested in September in connection with the FBI investigation into corruption in college basketball and charged with three counts of wire fraud and one count of money-laundering conspiracy. Miller, Dawkins' former boss at ASM, has not been arrested but received a disassociation letter from N.C. State in 2012. He is no longer certified by the NBA to represent its players.
The FBI investigation and the reported links between the athletes and agents raise the question of how carefully basketball programs examine the players they recruit, and whether they do enough to ensure that the athletes have not violated the NCAA's amateurism rules before they arrive on campus.
"For any college coach, the thing that always worries me, is what I don't know," Krzyzewski said recently. "Somebody can say, well, you're supposed to know everything. You can't know everything. You can know as much as possible while they're here. But it's impossible for you to know what went on before they got here."
