“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.
………..
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?” Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 