“That night I sat in my hotel room making a list of pros and cons in my head. Sure, it was breaking NCAA rules, but I would be helping Kanavis out. How would I feel if my mom was sick and I didn’t have money to help her? I went through this for hours and finally decided to do it. The next morning I went to the bank, pulled out some of my bar mitzvah money, $2,500 in cash, showed up at Kanavis’s door and told him, “Kanavis, I gave this a lot of thought, and I want to help you out. I know how I would feel if it was my mom.”
—Former registered NFL player agent Josh Luchs, describing to Sports Illustrated one of thirty incidents in which he gave money to college players to persuade them to sign up as clients.
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Yes, if it was Luchs’s mom, and he thought he could con an agent into handing over illicit cash using her as an excuse, he might have tried this too. Thus do we see how a profession that is faced with many ethical dilemmas is completely unprepared to apply even rudimentary ethics analysis to come to a correct decision. Luchs frames his dilemma to make him out to be a good guy, but what he was actually doing is exploiting a college kid’s personal problems to reel him in, breaking NCAA rules on the way and jeopardizing the player’s career. Did Luchs explain that accepting the money might lead to sanctions for both the player and his college? Apparently not. More importantly, Luchs wasn’t giving money to the athlete to help his family out; he was giving the money as the quid in an implied quid pro quo arrangement: “I help your mother, you sign with me. Deal?”
Luch’s account makes it clear that his style of ethics decision-making was nothing but rationalizations. In the course of his interview, he appeals to lots of them: “Everybody does it,” “It’s for a good cause,” “It’s not the worst thing,” “It was a special case,” “It isn’t my fault,” and others. Incredibly, he blames the college athletes:
“One of the misconceptions about the agent business is that the kids are victims, preyed on by people like me. When Alabama coach Nick Saban and others rail against the agent business, they don’t mention that most of the time the player or someone from his family approaches us. Guys see that one of their teammates has some cash, ask him about it, and suddenly my phone rings. It was rare to find a player who wouldn’t take the money. I put $10,000 cash in front of Kansas’s Dana Stubblefield, and he wouldn’t take it. I tried to pay UCLA’s J.J. Stokes and USC’s Keyshawn Johnson, and they said, “No.” But for every kid who didn’t take the money, there were dozens who called me and asked to get paid.”
What a surprise. A lot of young, immature, none-too-bright, ambitious football players who have had little real world experinece hear about a sports agent who hands out money and they ask for some. They are accountable, certainly, but they are victims as much as the students who buy drugs from on-campus drug dealers are victims. For all of us, the difference between breaking rules or laws when we are inexperienced and ill-prepared for life depends on moral luck. If we are unlucky enough to come in conduct with corrupt people like Luchs, then we get corrupted. If we didn’t then we get to be one of those people who later in life can criticize the conduct of others by saying, “I never did that.” But would we if we had run into our own Josh Luchs, a master of rationalizations with plenty of temptation to sell?
Naturally, Luchs is only talking now, after he has retired from the business, and undoubtedly will seek, and probably get, praise as a whistleblower. He deserves no praise, any more than a criminal who turns state’s evidence in exchange for a light sentence. Like his “generosity” to Kanavis, this is all for Luchs’s benefit, supported by facile rationalizations.
Ethics Alarms 
This is a continuation of what’s wrong with big-time college athletics. No one even mouths the old pretense for justifying the same: “A sound mind in a sound body.” College athletics, particularly football and basketball, have become so corrupt that, in my opinion, their continuation can hardly be justified, particularly when the financial support for them is provided by the taxpayers (in the case of public institutions) and/or by the enforcement of student fees against the college populace. Unfortunately, the same type of corruption is now filtering down to the high school level.