Rumors and innuendo abound in college basketball recruiting, which has a reputation for being even more lawless and shady than its big brother, college football recruiting. So it's simultaneously unsurprising and stunning when columnists like The Daily's Dan Wolken drop tidbits like this, as he did in an interview with The Big Lead:
↵There’s one particular program right now – an elite program that most fans wouldn’t ever guess – that everyone in basketball knows is straight-up paying guys. Will they get caught? I don’t know, but the more this stuff gets exposed, the more we can shatter these ridiculous media-fueled notions about who’s dirty and who isn’t.↵
Both beyond the pale and within the realm of possibility? Yeah, that's the world of college hoops recruiting in a nutshell, if you let the people thought to be authorities on the sport tell it. (Though if "everyone in basketball" knows about this, why isn't Wolken or someone in media reporting it?)