Mayo issue goes deeper than USC program
In basketball, agents and their reps get to players long before college years
 Dave Weaver / AP The spotlight is nothing new for O.J Mayo. He has been in the news since grade school, and his transfer to a Cincinnati high school became a huge media story. |
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In the days since ESPN reported that O.J. Mayo accepted thousands of dollars and benefits from Rodney Guillory while Guillory was working in the capacity of an agent's "runner" and Mayo was playing basketball at Southern California, there've been lots of opinions about the impact of this story. But answers? There haven't been many of those.
The answers are hard to find, but there's no way to get closer when so much focus is being placed on issues only tangentially related to the central concern.
It's not about the NBA's age minimum
Obviously, Mayo would not have been a college player if not for the draft rule, and according to ESPN's reporting, payments to Mayo predated his enrollment at USC. But fans of the college game should be also concerned about the overall health of the sport. And the sport cannot be healthy if teenaged players are being corrupted in this manner — by people who cozy up to them pretending to offer friendship or fatherly advice only so that they may one day deliver those players to agents.
Even if all the elite prep players were excluded from competing as collegians, there still would be agents surreptitiously invading college campuses trying to land the next-best talents — the college All-Americans.
Besides, the notion the NCAA had some sort of choice about whether to accept the "one-and-dones" is more than a bit fantastic. What were the colleges to do? Where would they have drawn the line? Derrick Rose couldn't go to college (obviously a stud headed straight to the NBA after a year) but Javaris Crittenton could? How would that have been policed, exactly?
It's not about whether USC was vigilant enough
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So what if Mayo had a flat-screen TV in his dorm room? The day he enrolled in college, he was less than one year removed from being a multi-millionaire. If he'd wanted a big TV, he easily could have whipped out a credit card and then made the minimum payments until he signed his NBA deal. That's apparently not what happened, but it would have been a plausible explanation.
When the Trojans decided to recruit and sign Mayo, they knew what the potential problems were. Mayo had been so high profile for so long it would have been hard for him not to have amateurism issues. And Guillory had been involved in a prior case involving a USC athlete, Jeff Trepagnier. They knew what the challenges were in this case and still decided that risk was worth the reward of having Mayo in a Trojans uniform. If somebody had busted into his dorm room and discovered he had a nice TV, it wouldn't have changed the fact that USC had decided to sign him in the first place.
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This isn't about Mayo's character
In reality, Mayo did not get the chance to form his character before he became a celebrity — and, ultimately, a commodity. He was written up in the national media when he was in seventh grade. If the agents didn't already know about him before, they went to see him then, and who knows what happened from that point?
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