Word that Keith Frazier, who played on one of the best college teams you will not see this postseason, had dropped out barely registered beyond the confines of Dallas.
Frazier, a 6-foot-5 shooting guard who was Southern Methodist’s third-leading scorer, simply stopped showing up for practice in early January, with the Mustangs still undefeated. A few days later, he left the university.
As emotionally fragile as he was talented, Frazier stood at the center of an academic scandal that led the NCAA to ban SMU from the postseason this year and suspend its coach, Larry Brown, who is in the basketball Hall of Fame, for nine games.
A few days after Frazier dropped out, I asked Brown about the student. Brown shook his head; more than a hint of a native Brooklyn rasp lingers in his voice.
“I think I invested more time in that kid than my family,” Brown said. “It’s a tragedy now in college sports — kids leave.”
That is not the tragedy.
The tragedy is that the adults in big-time high school and college basketball, despite attempts at reform and despite the presence of many fine student-athletes, exert far more energy trying to churn out victories than trying to provide an education. Young men like Frazier, who just three years ago was Brown’s top recruit, are collateral damage.
Frazier’s educational track record was pockmarked with failure. His high school grades mysteriously and quickly improved whenever his eligibility to play was at stake. He most likely had too many absences and failing grades to graduate from high school. And top officials at SMU ignored their own professors, who recommended that Frazier not be admitted to SMU, an academically tough university.
Frazier took an online summer course before enrolling in freshman classes. An SMU team assistant secretly completed Frazier’s work, an NCAA report found.
Frazier’s walk up and tumble down the stairs of big-time high school and college basketball kicks open a door to the corruption and neglect that characterize the educational lives of too many elite athletes. This pervasive corruption extends from Division I colleges down into the high school and amateur ranks.
There are bogus addresses for players, doctored grade sheets and illegal recruiting. In one terrible case, Dallas high school coaches concocted fake addresses and stashed top basketball players in a poorly supervised home. Two teenagers, who were friends, got into a fistfight, and one died.
Frazier, thankfully, remains healthy. But no adult — not even, it appears, his own mother — seems to have demonstrated more than a passing interest in his education. As long as he stroked jumpers and took jagged, high-leaping dashes to the hoop, all was fine.
“High school athletics are a tight little club where nobody wants to question anything,” said Anita Connally, a wiry former middle school teacher who, as the Dallas schools’ athletic compliance officer, investigated the grade-fixing and recruiting scandals surrounding Frazier.
Dallas school officials later fired Connally, who was a fierce reformer.
“You’d dig deep here,” she said, “and everyone just gets angry.”
This column is based on two confidential reports by the Dallas schools — which contained Frazier’s attendance records and extensive transcripts of investigative interviews with more than a dozen officials — and the NCAA sanctions report on SMU. I also interviewed two dozen players, teachers, investigators and coaches.
A Prize Catch
In 2013, Frazier was a McDonald’s high school all-American and perhaps the best player in Texas. Brown, an undisputed coaching genius, was newly hired at SMU and looking to draw attention to a basketball team that had long been mediocre. Brown and his assistants pursued Frazier like bird dogs after a pheasant. When Frazier signed, Brown howled with glee.
“Keith changed our program,” Brown said at the time. “We’ve never been successful in recruiting inner-city kids.
“Now, everywhere I go, kids are interested in us because of Keith.”
Brown had coached college ball twice before, and twice the NCAA sanctions ax had fallen on his teams, at UCLA and Kansas. Those penalties were ridiculous, he told me. Check it out.
I did, and he was wrong. At Kansas, there was a taped telephone call in which Brown admitted to illegal payments and assistants who acted as bagmen. At UCLA, he coached his team to the title game, only to have the NCAA toss out the tournament run because Brown had played two players who were academically ineligible.
SMU knew of Brown’s college track record when it hired him. The search for a nationally ranked basketball team requires sacrifices.
And the Frazier signing appeared to pay off.
A few months later, Frazier’s friend Emmanuel Mudiay, who was the best high school point guard in America, declared that he, too, was bound for SMU. Unfortunately, Mudiay attended Prime Prep high school in Dallas, an academic wreck of a charter school founded by former NFL star and commentator Deion Sanders. When questions arose about Mudiay’s grades, he skipped SMU and went to play in China. He now starts at point guard for the Denver Nuggets.
Frazier grew up playing basketball in Irving, a suburb west of Dallas. Like many talented athletes, he played for school teams in the winter and for Amateur Athletic Union teams each spring and summer. Adidas, Under Armour and Nike sponsor these amateur teams, which are perpetually warring duchies. To lure new players and poach stars from rivals, AAU coaches hand out athletic gear and other swag to players and parents alike.
Erven Davis, known as Big E, a hulking man with a honey-soft voice, agreed to chat with me in the lobby of a south Dallas hotel. He has coached AAU for years and is close to Frazier. He stressed that his team, Dallas Showtyme, was the vassal of no sneaker company, although he allowed that he had an “affiliation” with Under Armour.
“It gets bad, man,” he said. “People offering kids and parents all kinds of stuff — stuff that people get into trouble for.”
A Questionable Transfer
Davis had a close relationship with Royce Johnson, his cousin and the coach at Kimball High School. Kimball was on academic life support. It was also a basketball Valhalla, a perpetual contender for the state championship. Over the years, many of Davis’ best players — some of whom clearly did not live in Dallas — enrolled at Kimball. In return, according to a 2013 Dallas schools investigation, Kimball coaches allowed AAU teams to use their gym without a lease and without paying rent.
A few months into Frazier’s junior year at Irving High School, his mother announced she was moving her family to an apartment near Kimball. The basketball coach at Irving protested angrily. He argued that the Kimball coach had recruited Frazier, which is forbidden under Texas athletic regulations.
Dallas pulled together a committee composed of representatives from public elementary and middle schools that feed into Kimball High School. Frazier’s mother told this committee she could no longer afford her Irving apartment. The committee quickly approved the midyear move.
“There were a lot of backroom deals in Dallas,” said Gil Garza, the new director of athletics for the Dallas schools who is charged with cleaning up this system. “The thinking was: ‘I’m going to vote for your kid, and you’ll vote for mine.’”
Brett Shipp, an investigative reporter at WFAA-TV in Dallas, discovered that Frazier’s mother had lied to the committee. Her federally subsidized rent in Irving was fixed at $505 a month and had not gone up, as she claimed. Her former landlord complained that she owed him back rent.
Irving High School, while far from perfect, had markedly better academics than Kimball High School. Frazier’s mother responded to her critics on her Twitter account: “This is a cut throat business, I’m just saying.”
Frazier and his mother did not reply to telephone calls, an email or a note left at their apartment.
A Dallas schools investigation concluded that Kimball’s coach had “improperly recruited” Frazier.
Frazier proved a godsend to Kimball’s team. He averaged 21 points, eight rebounds and seven assists per game and pushed the Knights to a second consecutive state championship in 2012.
Frazier’s academics were another matter. When he arrived at Kimball in November of his junior year, his grades bounced along a river bottom. Investigators later discovered that his grades took a mysterious upward turn in the last weeks of that semester, just enough to allow him to retain his basketball eligibility. As a senior, the report said, he continued to skip many classes and fail many tests.
At SMU, meanwhile, Brown had zeroed in on Frazier as his top recruiting target. Brown, like most of his highly paid peers, stayed away from the recruiting, which can become an ethical bog. That was the job of his hungry young assistant coaches. And Ulric Maligi, who had deep roots in Dallas, was the first among equals.
“He is going to be a great head coach,” Brown said of Maligi.
First, however, Maligi had to land Frazier. By late May of his senior year, the student was at risk of not graduating. Maligi repeatedly called Kimball to ask about Frazier’s grades, according to the Dallas schools investigative report.
Maligi exchanged hot words with Johnson, Kimball’s basketball coach, according to the report. Do you realize, Maligi told the coach, that SMU’s compliance office has threatened to reject Frazier? He needs a higher grade-point average. Can Frazier raise his grades in science, English, math and history?
Johnson had reason to fear SMU’s anger. A high school coach who cannot place his stars with a top college team risks seeing his supply of young talent dry up.
A day or two later, an assistant coach and a school aide at Kimball lobbied Frazier’s teachers to raise his grades. Richard Dennis, a physics teacher, was so troubled that he sought the advice of an academic adviser.
“He asked my thoughts about him changing the grade,” the supervisor later told investigators for the Dallas schools. “I told him that he should not change the grade because Frazier was a high-profile student and changing the grade could result in him losing his job.”
Passing All His Classes
The physics teacher held firm. The other teachers said that they had done the same — yet, somehow, Frazier passed all their classes. An assistant coach picked up Frazier’s grade sheet and delivered it by hand to the central office at Kimball, stopping to cross out and change his physics grade. A secretary at the school then sent it to SMU.
This, the Dallas schools investigators noted, “created a fraudulent report.”
Maligi insisted to investigators that he had never asked anyone to forge a grade for Frazier.
An SMU spokesman said in an email that the university’s coaching staff asked about grades only because “we care about the potential of our student-athletes to be academically successful.”
That is lovely. Perhaps Maligi, who was hired for his understanding of the Dallas schools, did not realize that by late May, the spring semester was all but at an end and that it is difficult to transform failing grades into passing grades.
Later that summer, on Aug. 15, 2013, Dallas schools investigators asked SMU officials to help investigate the Frazier grade scandal. University officials responded with aggressive lethargy.
Kyle Conder, SMU’s senior associate athletics director for compliance, waited 50 days before sending a substantive email. His email was an exercise in terse and not terribly helpful language. Conder twice answered the investigators’ questions with a single word: “No.”
None of Frazier’s problems should have surprised SMU officials. The university has a faculty committee that examines athletic applications. Its charge is to balance leniency with pragmatism: Can an athlete survive at this academically rigorous school?
That committee turned down Frazier.
The SMU provost, in a move that startled committee members, overruled them. The provost explained he had made an “extraordinary exception” based “on the broader university perspective and needs.” In September, I asked an SMU spokeswoman about the nature of those broader needs. She wrote of “holistic” criteria.
“Holistic” was a fine word, and it signified that no one in the administration was prepared to sound embarrassed. Dennis A. Foster, a literature professor who is a former SMU faculty president, said professors had expressed anger at the university’s handling of this case.
“If athletes go to most classes, if they go to tutoring, we will carry most of them and make sure they pass and get a diploma,” Foster said. “But some athletes have so little internalized good study habits that even that is hard.”
Sadly, and predictably, none of this turned out well.
The Dallas schools finished their many investigations, and the superintendent fired more than a dozen coaches and staff members, including Johnson, Kimball’s coach.
In a deeply puzzling move, he swept out Connally, the reformer who had helped investigate these cases.
Two of the official reports excoriated Kimball High School principal Earl Jones for his lack of leadership, his poor management controls and his failure to recognize that his coaches were running amok. He survived with his job intact. I asked the Dallas schools spokesman Andre Riley about this.
In January 2015, Maligi announced that he was taking an “indefinite leave of absence.” Three days later, the university announced that the NCAA was investigating its basketball program.
Maligi quit. He now serves as national scouting director for John Lucas Enterprises, which evaluates and develops top middle school, high school, college and professional basketball players. He did not respond to a request for an interview.
Frazier returned to the SMU team. When the NCAA barred the Mustangs from postseason play in September, Brown called a team meeting. Frazier stood up and, in a loud, quavering voice, insisted that Brown tell everyone the truth: It was all Frazier’s fault. He ran out of the room in tears.
By early winter, Frazier had lost his starting position and was coming off the bench. This was not his hoop dream. After leaving SMU, Frazier transferred to North Texas, where his AAU coaches have connections.
Nothing Seems to Change
The NCAA has insisted, improbably and absurdly, that the quality of a prospective student’s high school education is not its headache.
All it cares about is whether a student hits the minimum grade-point average. It has taken few steps to address recruiting and academic violations, and it has forced head coaches to assume responsibility for the missteps of assistants, who, after all, are trying to please their boss. That was why the NCAA hit Brown with a nine-game suspension.
That struck me as generous sentencing for a three-time violator. Brown was not of the same mind. When I asked about it, he shrugged. The NCAA, those bureaucrats, have a thing about him.
“It actually turns my stomach; there’s got to be some motive,” he said. “They say ‘unethical behavior.’ If you lie to the NCAA, you’re fired. I’m not fired.”
Brown is not fired. However, he obstructed and at first lied to investigators, the NCAA report said.
Let’s posit that Brown is no worse than his sainted peers. John Wooden’s UCLA had boosters who offered illicit favors for players. The University of North Carolina staged phony courses. Kentucky’s John Calipari coached at two previous universities, and each was punished by the NCAA.
Big-time college basketball is a business, and head coaches soldier on without a backward glance. Have the sanctions and the attention paid to your team, I asked Brown, damaged recruiting? He brightened.
“Not one bit,” he said. “I think it’s only helping.”
His most physically talented player sat out the year as a redshirt. A top 6-foot-9 Australian recruit recently signed with SMU. The talent pump is primed. It’s a pity Frazier cannot enjoy the fruits. Brown shrugged sadly.
“We were all trying to help him,” Brown said. “It’s kind of a tragedy.”
There’s that word again. No doubt there’s tragedy to be found in this story. Although in the case of Frazier and troubled students like him, it centers not on wins and losses but on missed educations and on cynical adults and school officials who use these young men as athletic baubles.
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