[SBNATION] Tuesday, the FBI shocked the sports world by announcing bribery and fraud charges against four prominent college basketball assistant coaches and six peripheral hoops figures, implicating Adidas in a player-payments scheme, putting NCAA-probation'd Louisville in some really dangerous territory, and promising more names to come.
The shock wasn't learning how college hoops works. The sport long ago turned over its pre-college circuit to shoe companies and agency runners. It was jarring to see the breadth of the investigation, to notice the level of detail and leak-proof professionalism that an NCAA investigation typically lacks, and to realize the feds cared about routine recruiting transactions in the first place. Oh, and we got hard numbers for what star one-and-dones can make up front: $100,000 and $150,000, in a couple cases.
So far, the probe includes only basketball, at least publicly. When FBI assistant director William Sweeney said, "we have your playbook," he was referring to hoops' use of eventual apparel sponsorship deals to steer recruits toward certain universities. That's been a hidden-in-plain-sight element of college basketball that's rarely even been alleged in, say, football.
Football payments to players are a little less structured. It still happens, and allegations of six-figure offers still abound. But in football, the NCAA-created black market is filled less by apparel/agency types who want to make money and more by sports fans who want to see their teams win (and yeah, there are exceptions on both sides). With that, we turn once again to Steven Godfrey's "Meet the Bag Man:" 
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