Last year, Josh Luchs (the topic of George Dohrmann’s Sports Illustrated piece) revealed Luchs’ paying money and providing other benefits to recruits throughout his sports agent career. Luchs later lost his NFLPA Contract Advisor certification (which surprised no one), but it gave him a platform to speak about the inner workings of the pay-to-play system that many agents have caught themselves up in. Luchs is working on writing a book and is speaking across the country about a myriad topics related to sports agents. Recently, he spoke on a panel at the University of Oregon. He also just created a Twitter account, which is racking up followers by the day.
Prior to engaging the audience at Oregon, Luchs spoke to Rachel Bachman at The Oregonian. Give it a read. The JaMarcus Russell bit is interesting. And here is one of the exchanges:
Q: Is the NCAA in the best position to do something — better than schools themselves, prosecutors or the NFL Players Association?
A: The NCAA doesn’t have subpoena power. It’s the NFL Players Association’s job and responsibility to enforce their own regulations and the NCAA regulations as incorporated into the NFL Players Association regs. And they do a very poor job. They don’t initiate anything. They’re not proactive. They selectively enforce.
We are at a crossroads now more than ever, if people want this problem to change. Because we’ve got a collective bargaining agreement (expiring in March) that’s got to get done. Even though the NFLPA may not care what the NCAA wants, what makes them care is the NFL.
And the NFL cares about the NCAA because that’s their minor-league system, for all intents and purposes. So if the NCAA says, ‘Hey guys, we’re not going to let your scouts on the field. We’re not going to share game film. We’re not going to make our players available, we’re not going to give you our fields and our tracks to do pro-day workouts ….’
(Or), ‘We’ll let you do it, but make sure those guys over there control their agents and keep them away.’
