In early November, Setchen met with Louisville’s N.C.A.A. compliance staff and other administrators to try to persuade them to let Bowen play. The F.B.I., he said, had no further questions for his client at that time. (It has had none since.) Just before Thanksgiving, Louisville announced that Bowen would never be allowed to play for them. He found out about it when he saw the news on Twitter.

This January, after completing his fall semester at Louisville, Bowen transferred to the University of South Carolina, which awarded him a basketball scholarship — suggesting that administrators there believed his account that he was not personally involved in any payoffs. As a transfer, he could not play immediately, but he imagined he would be able to join the team in September, if not sooner. In May, though, the N.C.A.A. announced that it was ruling him ineligible for the entire 2018-19 season. The organization offered no public explanation for this decision, nor did it indicate when, if ever, it might permit him to play college basketball.

For all its problems, N.C.A.A. basketball remains the best route for players to advance to the N.B.A. They get first-rate coaching and the availability of round-the-clock medical, training and support staff. If a player wants to shoot 200 jump shots at 2 a.m., a student manager will go to the gym and rebound for him. At the top programs, they are more coddled than pro players.

Tom Konchalski, a respected recruiting expert who has put out a newsletter for college coaches for more than four decades, saw Bowen play on the grass-roots circuit. “Did I think he was an N.B.A. player? I don’t know about immediately,” he said. “But if he had been coached for a year or two by Rick Pitino, he would have been. Few are better at developing kids, really coaching them.”

There has been no indication that Brian Bowen Jr. is telling anything but the truth. He would not be the first high-school prospect whose services were exchanged for money that never found its way to him. Even if Bowen did know what was going on behind the scenes, or had some awareness of it, he was not in charge. He relied on his father and Christian Dawkins to guide his recruitment.

That evening when I talked with Bowen at the hotel in Louisville, his parents were downstairs in the coffee shop. They had all walked over together. Tugs was willing to talk a little about Christian Dawkins, whom he had considered a trusted figure from back home who could help lead him through the recruiting process. He did not want to think that his father took money and said he had not brought it up with him. He had lost basketball. He did not want to lose his father. He fell back on platitudes, for comfort, I sensed — and as a way of not delving too deeply into how, at the very time his basketball career should have been ascending, he ended up in exile. “I’ve got to stay strong for my parents,” he said. (Brian Bowen Sr. would not agree to be interviewed. He has never publicly denied taking money tied to his son’s recruitment.)

The last time Bowen and I talked was earlier this month, by phone. He had recently arrived in Australia to play professionally for the Sydney Kings, which he hoped could provide him with a different springboard to the N.B.A. He was living with his mother in a two-bedroom apartment in the suburb of Ryde. “I’m just trying to get adjusted,” he said. “The sleep schedule, the culture, just everything.” On the day he moved in and tried to set up his television, he somehow knocked out the electricity in his entire apartment building for four hours.