San Diego State is provisionally withholding senior Malik Pope from all team activities after he allegedly received a $1,400 loan from a pro agent, according to documents from the sweeping federal investigation into college basketball corruption.

Pope did not travel with the team for Saturday night’s game at San Jose State, and coach Brian Dutcher was uncertain whether the 6-foot-10 starting forward will return for the final week of the regular season or the conference tournament that begins March 7 in Las Vegas.

“I don’t know at this time,” Dutcher said. “We’re going to do an internal investigation and where that leads, and how quickly it leads, will be based on what the athletic department discovers and how quickly they act on it.”

Loans, especially from potential pro agents, are considered an impermissible benefit for student-athletes by the NCAA because they are not readily available to the general student body and violate “amateurism” rules. Sanctions can range from a few games to an entire season.


The documents are part of a story by Yahoo Sports posted in the early hours of Friday morning and implicate more than 30 current and former players from some of the country’s most storied programs, including Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky, Michigan State, Texas, Maryland and USC.

The documents list names and amounts allegedly paid in loans to them or family representatives by Andy Miller’s agency, ASM Sports. Former Miller employee Christian Dawkins was indicted along with four college assistant coaches in September as part of the FBI’s sweeping probe into what Joon H. Kim, acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, called the “dark underbelly of college basketball.”

By the end of the day, ESPN had released its own explosive story in which, according to people familiar with the FBI probe, Arizona coach Sean Miller can be heard on wiretapped phone conversations with Dawkins discussing a $100,000 payment to secure the services of 7-1 Deandre Ayton, the Wildcats’ star freshman center who attended two years of high school at San Diego’s Balboa Prep.

One of the documents in the Yahoo report is a balance sheet dated Dec. 31, 2015. Under the heading “loan to player” are 31 current or former college players with amounts next to their names ranging from $71.39 to the $43,500 for former North Carolina State’s Dennis Smith, now with the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks.


The presumption was those players would eventually be represented by Miller’s agency when they turn pro, although the documents indicate that not all did and some payments were written off as a “bad loan.”

Most were for a few thousand dollars. Next to Pope’s name is $1,400. Pope was in his sophomore season at SDSU in 2015-16, having bypassed the NBA Draft after some promising freshman performances that had some speculating he could be a first-round pick.

It is unclear from the documents whether Pope or an associate actually received the loan and, if so, whether it was repaid.

Asked what Malik had told him, Dutcher said: “I can’t comment on that. It’s an internal investigation. Malik will discuss with our compliance people what transpired or did not transpire … Right now it’s just an internal investigation. There’s nothing proven or disproven. We’re looking into Malik’s name on a list.”


Also on the list is Texas junior guard Eric Davis Jr. for allegedly receiving $1,500. Texas announced it is holding him out of competition “for precautionary reasons until further notice, pending the review of this situation.”

Other schools issued statements that they are cooperating with the NCAA and conducting internal investigations but did not say whether implicated players would be suspended. We’ll get that answer Saturday, when most schools have games.

The last SDSU basketball player to serve a suspension for an impermissible benefit was Winston Shepard at the start of the 2012-13 season. According to several sources, it involved a car loan co-signed by a family he had befriended while attending Findlay Prep in the Las Vegas area. The car was returned after a few days, and the NCAA calculated benefits of approximately $400.

That fetched a suspension totaling 10 percent of the regular season – or three of 30 games. The NCAA generally has athletes repay the money to a charity of their choice.


Numerous college athletes ensnared for impermissible benefits in 2012, and cases involving dollar amounts in the mid four-figures drew suspensions equivalent to 30 percent of the season – or nine games.

SDSU has three regular-season games remaining: at San Jose State, and home next week against Boise State and Nevada. The only other guaranteed game after that is in the Mountain West tournament.

What complicates this particular situation is that the schools and the NCAA do not have access to the federal documents, which are currently under judicial seal while the defendants await trial.

The NCAA likely won’t be able to act until the legal cases are further along and documents become part of the public record, which, if the cases are settled before trial, might never happen. But schools have the ability to conduct their own investigations and self-report violations to the NCAA if, say, a player admits to an infraction.


Yahoo reported last week that the documents received on the raid of Miller’s office, plus hours upon hours of wire-tapped phone conversations, could implicate players from dozens of high-profile programs but mentioned no names. Yahoo was then able to view some of Miller’s seized documents and photograph them, and Friday’s early-morning story outlined a vast network of alleged payments between his agency and prospective clients.

One page says North Carolina State’s Smith received $43,500. Another says a different Miller associate loaned him $73,500.

Seton Hall’s Isaiah Whitehead allegedly received $26,136 plus an additional $37,657.

Other players named include Michigan State’s Miles Bridges, Alabama’s Collin Sexton, Duke’s Wendell Carter and two players currently at USC: Bennie Boatwright and Chimezie Metu.


USC has already suspended sophomore De’Anthony Melton for the season because of his links to the federal case. Foothills Christian senior Taeshon Cherry decommitted from USC and has been since identified as an unidentified player in the federal indictment whose family received money from an agent. (Cherry recently committed to Arizona State.)

USC associate head coach Tony Bland, since fired by the school, was one of the four college coaches indicted. He has since pled not guilty and is awaiting trial.

Bland played and coached at SDSU, but there is no indication he is linked to Pope’s appearance in the Miller documents. Dutcher noted that Bland left SDSU for USC in 2013 and the alleged loan was on a balance sheet for 2015.

“I’d like to say that I’m confident that our staff has done the right things,” Dutcher said, “that neither I or any member of our staff knows Andy Miller or any of his associates or are associated with them in any way.


“We’ve taken great pride in our compliance here at San Diego State. In 19-plus years, I think everybody knows we run a program that abides by NCAA rules and take great pride in that and will continue to do that.”


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mark.zeigler@sduniontribune.com; Twitter: @sdutzeigler

UPDATES:

11:40 a.m.: This story was updated to reflect Pope’s suspension. Story was originally posted at 7:15 a.m.