Eyes wide shut

That seamy underbelly, it's right there in front of us now. But then it always has been.

The shadow economy that feeds big-time college buckets is almost as old as college buckets, and we've always known it was there. That's why there is sort of "well, duh" meme to what's coming out of the federal fraud trial that's going on right now, in which the various machinations of apparel company agents, blue-chip recruits and their parents and, yes, the programs, coaches and schools that make piles of cabbage off their own apparel deals are making headlines.

If not exactly news to anyone who's been paying attention for at least three decades.

Look. We've always known there were blatant shenanigans going on at the nexus of Greed and Need, which is and has been for a long time located in the heart of the whole AAU hoops culture. AAU has long been a Wild West street market for kids to sell themselves to prospective employers, i.e. major college hoops powers. And, yes, sell themselves is exactly the right word, because recruitment at the highest levels of college basketball is pure commerce. We really want you, kid and Fine, here's what it'll cost ya have been long the two sides of that coin.

What's coming out in the fraud trial is nothing new, in other words. It's simply business, and it's been going on for a long time. The only thing remotely new about it is how openly it's all being conducted, and how brazenly the apparel company middlemen and the kids and their parents are willing to strike their deals.

Their corrupt deals. Because make no mistake, what's going on, and has been for decades, makes a sham of everything the NCAA claims college athletics is supposed to be about. It's corruption happening right out loud, that seamy underbelly not really much of an underbelly at all.

In which case, you'd think college basketball coaches with some stature would be rising to condemn that underbelly as loudly as possible. To defend the integrity of the game they love. Wouldn't you?

Well ... yes. Except that's not happening.

Instead, the avatar of all that is supposedly good and right about college hoops, Mike Krzyzewski of sainted Duke, is downplaying all of this. He calls what's coming out in the fraud trial a "blip." North Carolina coach Roy Williams agrees. They both think the problem is overblown, that it all fits neatly into the good old Isolated Incidents file.

Of course, they pretty much have to say that. Because they're part of the whole corrupt system themselves.

As so well pointed out by Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports, who's been all over this, Coach K in particular is in no position to condemn anything. After all, his star newbie last year, Marvin Bagley III, played for an AAU team bankrolled by Nike, which in turn gives wads of money to Krzyzewski's Duke program as its official apparel provider. And this year's prize freshman, Zion Williamson, was the subject of an FBI wiretap in which an apparel company middleman and a Kansas assistant coach openly discussed what the kid's family wanted -- a job for Dad, cash, rent-free housing -- to deliver him to Lawrence.

Of course, Williamson wound up at Duke. Which, yes, unavoidably makes you wonder what kind of deal got cut in Durham.

Now, it's possible, I suppose, that no deal got cut at all. Pretty much anything's possible in a nation whose chief executive gets in juvenile name-calling spats with porn stars.  But do you wonder why  Coach K is so suddenly so tongue-tied on the subject of corruption in college hoops?

It is to despair.