Frank Martin has an interesting take on the FBI scandal

by:TJ Walker10/17/18

South Carolina head coach Frank Martin had an interesting take on the FBI scandal that has taken over college basketball the last 14 months. Martin called it college basketball’s “audit” and believes the sport will be OK.

South Carolina was one of the major players for Zion Williamson and actually enrolled Brian Bowen last season but Bowen never suited up for the Gamecocks before leaving for Australia to play professionally.

South Carolina hasn’t been mentioned throughout the FBI scandal.

Here’s Martin’s statement in its entirety:

“I’m not gonna sit here and act like I don’t know some of the things that go on in the business. It’s my job to know. Every walk of life, every industry needs to be audited every once in awhile, and this is our audit. Whatever is broken will get fix.

Whoever is not playing… I’m not into this argument that, drugs for example. We all want to sit around and talk about ‘Well, you only did this.’ Well, it’s against the law. Don’t do it. Whatever the rules are, if people don’t like them, change them. Work to change the rule. If the rules are in place, they’re in place. We all need to work underneath or abide by those rules.

I’m not into cheating. That’s the verbiage I’ve used and I will continue to use. I’m not into it. I don’t sit at home and whine about the people that do. They’re the ones that’s jeopardizing their schools, their families, their assistants, their careers. That’s their decision to make in life. I choose not to go into that direction.

But this is our audit. Every company needs to be audited every once in awhile and we’re being audited right now. What I hope is, whatever the mistakes that are being made, some of the of the stuff that the public is learning about that some of us have kinda known is going on, that it gets cleaned up. The rest of the business, which operates pretty good, it’s not as bad as it’s made out to be, but there is some stuff that we, myself included even though I knew some stuff, a lot more stuff is coming public now and will continue to become public. It’s unfortunate but we’re being audited. That’s all it is. We have to sit back and deal with the audit, not point fingers or blame and let that stuff kinda take care of itself and put our arms around a beautiful sport that has brought so much joy to so many people for so many years and let’s fix the problems. Build on the good and continue to move forward.”

We’ve heard so much about Brian Bowen over the last 14 months, but after the FBI trials in New York we don’t have any evidence that Bowen himself knew he was being sold to schools.

I asked USC star Maik Kotsar about Bowen and what kind of teammate he was for the Gamecocks last season:

“Brian is a really nice guy. He was practicing with us and he was there to compete. He was out there trying to get better himself and better his teammates. He’s overall a great guy. Of course I feel bad for him but everyone has their own road and everything happens for a reason. He’s playing in Australia in that league right now where that’s great competition over there and I think he’ll get to where he’s supposed to be.”

We had several people go under oath and actually say that Bowen knew nothing of what his dad, Kenny Johnson or anyone with adidas were doing. It does make you feel somewhat bad for Bowen.

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