Prime Prep offers baroque twists on this American sports tale. It features celebrity culture run amok and shoddy oversight of a charter school. Under Armour provides all of the school’s uniforms and practice equipment.

There is the strange curlicue that is the high school career of Mudiay. Academics at Prime Prep are enough of a shambles that he might have been blocked from playing major college hoops. So he exited east, heading for the Guangdong Southern Tigers of the Chinese Basketball Association, where he will make $1.5 million before jumping to the N.B.A. in a year.

The N.C.A.A. eligibility center’s staff members insisted they had examined Prime Prep’s academics in “granular detail.” They found some cause for concern but appear to have missed several boulders of evidence.

Poor and working-class parents talked of academics but cherished most dearly Sanders’s promise that their sons would play and play, and with luck obtain scholarships and pro contracts. Okey Apkom, a dissident member of Prime Prep’s board, told me it was common knowledge that athletes received the grades they needed to keep their eligibility.

“The parents wanted a 2.5 G.P.A. so the kids could play,” he said. “And it happened.”

There are deeper pools of darkness. Former Prime Prep staff members make credible accusations of violence and intimidation by Sanders and his hangers-on. In his reality show — “Deion’s Family Playbook,” on Oprah Winfrey’s television network — Sanders told his son that he was so angry that late report cards were threatening to make his athletes miss games that he had “locked up” with a Prime Prep administrator, although “I ain’t hit him.”

He was technically correct. Witnesses said Sanders grabbed tight in his fists the collar of a school official, who fell to the floor. In another instance, Sanders was heard on a recording — obtained by The Dallas Observer — threatening his business partner, D. L. Wallace, because he had blocked Sanders from hiring coaches and from allowing him to recruit as he pleased.