“There wasn’t a whole lot that was surprising,” Kondelis said on The DA Show. “If you’re a sports fan, I don’t know how you don’t know what’s going on as far as recruiting and players getting paid. What was a little bit shocking to me was the amount of money that was getting passed around.”
For example, Brian Bowen Sr. received numerous offers for the services of his son, Brian Bowen II, who committed to Louisville but, due to an FBI investigation, didn’t play a single second of college basketball.
“Oklahoma State offered him $100,000, an $80,000 car and a house to potentially play there for one year,” Kondelis said. “The fair-market value of some of these kids is astronomically high, and that was definitely surprising. . . . That wasn’t even the highest offer that Brian Bown Jr. got, [who] was not even a top-15 player coming out of high school in the country. So imagine the actual worth of somebody like Zion Williamson. It’s millions. It’s millions of dollars that they’re worth to that program. The purists trying to say that amateurism still works and the price of an education – the schools don’t want these kids to get an education. They’re looked at as employees that can help bring in revenue. It’s kind of a joke to even put it in those terms.”