INDIANAPOLIS – Abject greed has put college basketball where it is today. The naked and unseemly lust for the wrong kind of money led it here, into the middle of an FBI investigation, with several coaches under arrest and one legend defrocked and more of both, so much more, to come. More arrests. More defrocking. This is the comeuppance of college basketball, but the guilty parties are not just the seedy coaches, the greedy parents, the oily Adidas executive and the slithering agents.

College and university presidents are to blame, too. Because it is their abject greed, their naked and unseemly lust for the wrong kind of money, that let this happen.

By arresting an Adidas executive and laying bare a series of schemes that saw money gushing from a shoe company and into the hands of recruits and their families — with the trade-off being those recruits would play for the right school, sign with the right agent and wear the right sneaker — the FBI has confirmed that the NCAA doesn’t run NCAA basketball.

Shoe companies do.

And the NCAA didn’t simply let shoe companies into the house. The NCAA hopped into bed with Adidas and Nike and Reebok, and now that Under Armour has become a major player, the NCAA has hopped into bed with that shoe company as well.

Understand what that four-letter word — NCAA — means here, and first you must understand what it does not mean here: It does not mean president Mark Emmert and vice president Oliver Luck. It does not mean any of the people who work in that big red-brick building at 182 Wabash St., and I’m not saying that because 182 Wabash St. is an address in Indianapolis, and what do you know? I write for the Indianapolis Star. We must protect our own, you know.

No.

We must protect the truth, and rip away the veneer of untruth that the NCAA — those people at 182 Wabash, that NCAA — allowed the shoe companies into the house. Nope, not true. You know who let the shoe companies inside?

College presidents.

That NCAA.

Emmert and Luck and the rest, they do what the presidents tell them. By and large the NCAA is merely the collection of schools that compete in Divisions I, II and III, and the NCAA works at the pleasure of its member schools. And its member schools are run by presidents.

So I will repeat, and then I will explain: The NCAA (read: presidents) had the power to stop the shoe companies, or at least derail their influence before it became too late, but they've been too busy cashing the shoe companies’ checks. Louisville has a 10-year deal with Adidas worth $160 million. Michigan’s deal with Nike is for 11 years and $169 million. Texas and Ohio State have deals with Nike worth $250 million, and UCLA’s 15-year deal with Under Armour is for $280 million. IU has a contract with Adidas worth $53.6 million over eight years. Purdue is in an eight-year contract extension with Nike worth $16.2 million.

The NCAA — the school presidents — let this happen. It is too late, not to mention transparently hypocritical, for anyone sitting in a president’s chair to bemoan the incomprehensible wealth flowing through college sports. The presidents signed off on it years ago, allowing companies like Nike and Adidas to “supplement” their football and basketball coaches’ salaries. Alabama football coach Nick Saban, for example, has an eight-year, $65 million contract with an annual base salary of $245,000. He also has an annual “talent fee” of roughly $6.5 million, which comes from various places, but draws heavily from the money Nike gives the school.

You paying attention? It's possible that Nike pays Nick Saban more to coach Alabama than Alabama pays him to coach Alabama.

Meanwhile, Adidas has been paying Rick Pitino more than $2 million a year to coach Louisville. Any wonder why Pitino’s loyalty to Adidas would be so great, it cost him his job?

Oh, this is the NCAA’s fault all right. The schools, the presidents, are supposed to be the adults in the room while the overgrown children — the football and basketball coaches — are drinking from the shoe company spigot. Instead, the presidents have bellied their schools up to the bar and really opened the tap.

NCAA presidents had the chance in 1992 to stop the shoe companies before they got going so fast. With coaches and schools growing leery of private “exposure” camps — namely the Five-Star Camp out of Pittsburgh, and the Nike Camp in Indianapolis — the National Association of Basketball Coaches submitted a proposal that would have put the NCAA in charge of nine regional camps, effectively putting Nike and Five-Star out of business. The cost was estimated at $250,000 to $500,000 a year for the NCAA, a cost to be spread among hundreds of schools.

The NABC plan was opposed by the Presidents Commission. The presidents, the smartest people on campus, decided it would be cheaper to let Nike (and later Adidas with the ABCD Camp in Teaneck, N.J.) run their own camps. The shoe company camps would have to meet certain standards to be NCAA-certified. The shoe companies met those standards.

And the money started flowing.

In media rooms we laughed about the cheating that was happening, rolling our eyes when the same schools kept recruiting the same players. You knew which recruits had their hands out, based on which schools were recruiting them. And wasn't it funny how kids who went to Nike camps and played for Nike-sponsored AAU teams tended to sign with Nike schools? The same was happening with "Adidas kids" and "Under Armour" kids.

Here’s how dirty the game had become:

It's 2006, and a group of a dozen or so men were eating at St. Elmo Steak House. It was a mixture of college basketball coaches and NBA scouts — and me. It’s important you know I’m there, because one of the coaches didn’t know. And he’s about to brag about cheating. Right in front of me.

The 2006 Final Four was in Indianapolis. It would start the next day at the RCA Dome, but the party already had begun. The Final Four is college basketball’s annual family reunion, with coaches coming to town for the NABC convention and to pick up their free Final Four tickets. In those days, many coaches sold their tickets to a pair of AAU honchos from California, twin brothers Dana and David Pump, who also ran a ticket brokerage. Coaches sold their tickets to the Pumps, who just so happened to have access to and influence with some of the best basketball recruits in California, courtesy of their AAU program. Everyone involved always told me this was not a quid-pro-quo, not tickets-for-recruits. I’d ask coaches. I’d ask the Pumps. I’d ask the NCAA. Everybody always told me: Stop looking. Nothing to see here.

So, anyway. The Final Four is a gathering place for coaches, and Friday night is party night. The party at St. Elmo, I was invited there by an NBA scout. We’re the last to arrive. We sit at the end of the table.

One coach doesn’t see me.

They’re swapping stories, these guys, stories about games and referees and, eventually, recruiting. And this one coach, a head coach from the SEC, starts talking about a high school senior he’d tried to recruit once. I never caught the kid’s name, not sure he even said the kid's name, but this SEC coach was in on that kid, he let everyone know. He was in deep. And then out of the blue, the kid picks a school from the Big 12. The coach names the Big 12 school. He wants everyone to know: He got outcheated.

“I had that thing wired,” he says. “And then (the Big 12 school) comes in, and it’s over. They got the kid. I don’t know what they did, but I had it wired. Tell you what: I’m never recruiting against (that Big 12 coach) again.”

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Around the table, men are laughing. Most of them are current or future Division I head coaches. Some are NBA scouts. And me. I’m working for CBSSports.com at the time, so I walk up to the cheating SEC coach, introduce myself, and ask him: “Who was the recruit?” The SEC coach glares down at the NBA scout who brought me, and tells him to get me the (expletive) out of there.

This was college basketball’s wild west, exacerbated by the influence of shoe companies, and the NCAA could have stopped it. Time and again, groups of well-meaning coaches asked the NCAA to change the recruiting calendar. Do away with the summer evaluation period, which sent recruits (and coaches) to camps run by Nike and Adidas. Put recruiting back in the hands of high school coaches, not AAU programs and the leeches who hang around them. Make the evaluation period coincide with the high school season.

No, the NCAA (read: presidents) said. No, again and again. The shoe companies weren’t just the golden goose for recruits and AAU coaches and agents, see. Shoe companies were the golden goose for NCAA schools. Again: Adidas and Louisville have a 10-year contract for $160 million.

For me, this whole thing had reached its nadir well before that surreal 2006 night at St. Elmo. Because I was there four years earlier in Teaneck, N.J., when a high school senior from Akron, Ohio, named LeBron James attended the 2002 Adidas ABCD Camp. He had recently suffered a broken wrist and couldn’t play, but LeBron was The Chosen One and adidas wanted to show him off, so someone flew him to the camp in New Jersey. I was there when LeBron met the media. I was working for The Charlotte Observer at the time, covering college basketball.

This is how I described LeBron at age 17 in the Observer:

“The diamond studs in his ears look to be two carats each. The chain around his neck is white gold, as is the 2-inch crucifix hanging from it. The cross is covered with diamonds, not Jesus. … He wears a gray muscle shirt bearing the slogan "King James" and No. 23.”

When I asked him where a high school senior gets a shirt like that, he said what he may well have thought was the truth.

"It was in my (hotel) room when I got there,” LeBron told me. “God gave it to me."

Oh, it was raining money in those days. Nike and Adidas were the thundercloud, and NCAA presidents were squealing happily and getting wet.

Fifteen years later it's still raining, harder now. But God isn’t giving away T-shirts anymore. He’s angry with the NCAA, and he has sent the FBI to seek vengeance. That’s what I’m saying, and I may well think it’s the truth.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.