Latest Yahoo! report on college basketball probe mentions former Villanova players

Pat Forde and Pete Thamel of Yahoo! Sports gave us a nice little Friday morning “bombshell” with their latest report on the FBI’s probe in college basketball. Your Villanova Wildcats and three former players are mentioned in the report, but we’ll explain why this doesn’t mean much (yet).

Former players Kyle Lowry, Antonio Pena and Maalik Wayns are listed as having taken loans from ASM (their agency).

An ASM balance sheet in the hands of federal investigators shows accounts through Dec. 31, 2015, with the subheading, “Loan to Players.” It listed several who were in high school or college as receiving four-figure and five-figure payments from ASM Sports.

Lowry, Pena and Wayns show up on this list alongside a host of more recent players. Given the timing (December, 2015) and the inference that the loans were recent to the players on the list, this doesn’t mean much as far as Villanova is concerned. Agents can loan their clients money, and all three players were several years removed from Villanova in 2015.

The other mention of Villanova comes later in the article, where advisor Christian Dawkins reportedly had a dinner with “Villanova coaches.”

According to the documents, Dawkins has dinners listed with plenty of boldface names in the sport – Tom Izzo, “Villanova coaches,” Fultz and the family of wayward five-star prospect Mitchell Robinson.

That’s oddly...not specific at all. At least compared to everything else in these documents. If your expense report policies are anything like mine, that meeting sounds half-made up.

The other important detail here is that this is a Dawkins expense report back to ASM. There’s no payment/impermissble benefit here as coaches are free to meet with whoever they want.

We’ll continue to update as more details are released, but for now, I’m not hitting the panic button.