It’s amazing what many things can change in college basketball over the course of a couple weeks.
ESPN reported that the Feds had intercepted a wiretap of several conversations between Arizona coach Sean Miller and Christian Dawkins, an employee of ASM Sports, discussing a $100,000, payment for freshman star DeAndre Ayton to secure the services of the 7-1 center and Miller told Dawkins to directly through him as opposed to going through assistant Book Richardson, it looked like Miller was on the way out.
Miller did not coach in a loss at Oregon, a game in that Ayton played.
Richardson was one of four Division I assistants to be arrested and charged by FBI agents as a result of an investigation into NCAA corruption and bribery. Dawkins was arrested in the fall for his role in facilitating multiple illegal payments and benefits to recruits.
But last week, after publicly denying he ever paid any player of players’ family to attend Arizona, he was back on the bench, coaching the Wildcats to a 76-65 over Stanford in Tucson and another Pac-12 regular season championship.
Miller has the complete backing of the university president Robert Robbins, the Arizona Board of Regents and thousands of fans at the McKale Center who stood and cheered for Miller on his return before the start of the game.
Ayton’s family attorney has also denied he ever accepted a payment from any source and said the projected top-three pick “couldn’t pick Dawkins out of a lineup” because he had never met him. Paul V. Kelly, Arizona’s outside counsel, said Ayton has been interviewed by the FBI and NCAA officials this season, interviews that failed to produce “a shred of evidence” that would compromise his eligibility.
ESPN stands by its reporting.
But there have been some doubts raised about the ESPN report. 247 Sports noted some discrepancies in the timeline reported by ESPN. The ESPN report was upgraded to clarify the date of the call between Miller and Dawkins, but it did not match with the dates the U.S. Attorney’s Office said it had been wiretapping Dawkins between June 9, 2017 though Sept. 25.
Pat Forde of Yahoo! Sports appeared on ESPN 680 and said there was nothing in the documents Yahoo! Sports reviewed that mentioned Miller.
Miller vehemently denied the allegation in the ESPN report, calling it “defamatory.”
Arizona got an added plus when high scoring guard Alonzo Trier was reinstated after a brief absence due to a positive test for a banned substance school officials say he unknowingly ingested two years ago.
This has been a crazy week for the players, who had no idea whether Miller was coming back. “I think we can flip the story,” senior Dusan Ristic said. “We can make a run in the tournament. We can change the whole situation. Two days ago, everyone was against us. The whole nation, even some of you guys were against us. We’re going to use that as motivation.”
Miller has been the head coach at Arizona since 2008. He is a three-time Pac-12 Coach of the Year and has led the Cats to five Pac-12 titles. He has a 243-72 record at UA.
