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The steady stream of incriminating details in the David Salinas saga continued Tuesday afternoon with the revelation that Gonzaga's Mark Few was one of the coaches ensnared by the AAU kingpin's ponzi scheme.
SI.com reported Few invested $353,000 with Salinas, the financial adviser who founded the Houston Select summer basketball program more than 15 years ago. A CBSSports.com report on Sunday night revealed financial ties between Salinas and 10 other coaches including former Arizona coach Lute Olson, Texas Tech's Billy Gillispie, Baylor's Scott Drew and former Utah coach and current Gonzaga assistant Ray Giacoletti.
What makes Few's involvement a potentially damaging revelation for Gonzaga is the implication that coaches were investing with Salinas in return for his influence in helping steer prospects to their programs. Among the list of college standouts Houston Select has produced the past decade is Demetri Goodson, the point guard who spent the last three seasons at Gonzaga before transferring to Baylor this offseason to play football.
It would have been easy for Gonzaga to argue previously that the signing of Goodson had little to do with Giacoletti's financial ties to Salinas since then-assistant Leon Rice was the primary recruiter. The circumstantial evidence is more damning, however, now that we know Few apparently also is involved.
In addition to tying Few to Salinas, the SI.com report revealed several other previously unreported details:
• The dozen current or former coaches known to have invested with Salinas lost a combined $7.8 million. Gillispie's investment alone was $2.3 million; Olson's, $1.17 million; Drew's, $621,000.
• Salinas was never actually a registered investment adviser representative, and his J. David Group was never registered as an investment adviser firm with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
• Besides Few and the other coaches previously reported by CBSSports.com, former Rice, Wichita State and Cornell basketball coach Scott Thompson also invested with Salinas. His investment was most recently valued at $65,000.
It will be especially interesting to watch how the NCAA handles the murky nature of the founder of an AAU program managing college coaches' money. No existing rule prohibits coaches from investing in what they believe to be legitimate securities, but the potential conflict of interest is obvious enough that it likely won't go unpunished.