The enduring taint

Once upon a time the City College of New York (CCNY) had a dandy little basketball team that was coached by a legend named Nat Holman, and it was so skilled and played with such discipline and will it won both the NIT and NCAA tournaments in the same year.

That year was 1950, and the CCNY Beavers were the toast of the Big Apple.

The next year, they were something else entirely.

The next year, several of their players were found to have shaved points during that magic season, taking money from gamblers not to lose games but to knock them off the level. Which comes to the same thing.

Worst part was, CCNY wasn't alone.

Turns out Manhattan College, NYU and Long Island University were also in on the fix, and eventually the scheme swallowed up Toledo, Bradley and '51 NCAA champion Kentucky as well -- plus players from USC, San Francisco, Oregon, Colorado, Georgetown and the Ivy League who met with gamblers but didn't take the deal.

Between that and another point-shaving scandal later in the decade, it all but wrecked college basketball. Nothing destroys the public trust more than players taking money to manipulate outcomes -- and without that trust, our games are just  professional wrestling by another name.

College buckets found that out the hard way 75 years ago.

Unfortunately, the lesson had an expiration date.

Here we are in the science fiction-y year of 2026, see, and it's 1951 all over again. According to a federal indictment in Pennsylvania that detonated like an atomic bomb yesterday, another point-shaving scheme has infected college buckets. This time it involves 39 players on 17 NCAA Division I teams who fixed dozens of games for another pack of hyenas looking to scam their way to riches.

Twenty of those indicted played college buckets either last season or the season before, per the indictment. Four of those played for their current teams just in the last week -- including a kid named Simeon Cottle, who scored 21 points to lead Kennesaw State past Florida International just two days ago.

Cottle, who's averaging 20.2 points per game this season, was the Conference USA preseason player of the year. He's now just an ex-player, Kennesaw State having summarily dismissed him after news of the fix broke.

Look. I'm not going to take to my bully pulpit here (for long, anyway) to point out that not only does history have an uncomfortable tendency to replicate itself, in this case it was as easy to predict as sunrise.  NIL and the unrestrained transfer portal, after all, have turned big-time college basketball and football into a purer money chase than they already were.  

It's been an I'm-gettin'-mine culture for decades, but now it's operating in broad daylight instead of the shadows beneath tables. Those thousand-dollar handshakes are now million-dollar NIL deals, and the "student-athlete" is not just fiction but a fable out of Aesop. The "student-athletes" are purely mercenaries now, same as their coaches and athletic departments.

Throw in all those mushrooming online betting sites, and how can you be shocked by the news out of Pennsylvania yesterday? Especially when the universities (or at least the networks who pay to televise their games) openly promote those sites?

Greed, it seems, is an enduring taint, and so once again history comes back around. That aforementioned point-shaving scandal in the late 1950s, for instance?

It eventually involved some 50 players from 27 schools. And the primary fixer was a former professional basketball player named Jack Molinas -- who, for a brief time, played for the Fort Wayne Pistons and then in a handful of minor leagues.

Now it's all these years later, and guess what?

One of those named but not charged in the indictment yesterday was Antonio Blakeney, who, for a brief time, played for the Chicago Bulls and then in a handful of leagues overseas.

Around and around the wheel goes.