Kansas Subpoenaed for Basketball Investigation

Written by: Joe Ryan

Twitter: @joeywingspan

Twitter:  @wingspansports  (follow for all your Sports needs by clicking the @wingspansports handle given there) (we’ll follow back, you won’t regret it)

(Yahoo) — The University of Kansas tacitly acknowledged that it has been subpoenaed by the federal government in the ongoing federal basketball investigation, according to a recent response to a public records request.

In an email to Yahoo Sports in response to a Kansas Open Records Act request, the school replied to a request for “any subpoenas received by (University of) Kansas… in relation to the ongoing federal investigation of college basketball” by stating it “has public records that are responsive to your request.” The university also stated it is “cooperating with the government inquiry.”

The university denied Yahoo’s April request for copies of subpoenas, citing the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act and saying their release would “constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” Multiple lawyers and document experts contacted by Yahoo Sports confirmed that the language used by the university is an acknowledgement of the school being subpoenaed by the federal government.

In response to a request for comment Monday, a University of Kansas spokesman referred Yahoo Sports to an earlier statement regarding the indictment that identified Kansas as a victim and expressed confidence that the school’s staff followed the rules.

The Kansas Basketball program has been subpoenaed by the FBI for the ongoing basketball investigation regarding Billy Preston and Silvio de Sousa. The people of interest will have to appear in court due to being subpoenaed.

As a person who has been following this story, including the entire NCAA investigation, in my opinion, this is another non-story by Pat Forde, Pete Thamel and Dan Wetzel. I acknowledge their credibility, and I understand they have to get stories out there for clicks, and by no means am I saying this is “Fake News”, I just think it’s a non-story.

First, the three authors stated in their “Breaking” tweet that Kansas refused to turn over the documents. Very misleading. Kansas refused to turn their documents over to Yahoo, especially the three of them. What they want you to believe is that Kansas just refused to turn the documents over all together. No, no, no. They handed them over to the FBI and the NCAA, the people who matter, not to Pat Forde, Pete Thamel and Dan Wetzel. Just a ridiculous, misleading headline.

You see, here at Wingspan, were going to give it to you straightforward, and give you our thoughts on the subject. We’re not doing this for the clicks. We’re doing this to share OUR thoughts and then to interact with you guys to get YOUR thoughts. A healthy, normal sports debate. That’s all we want. We aren’t looking for the clicks, the retweets, the likes, spamming the reddit pages, we just want to have an open discussion about topics.

In my opinion, this is the same EXACT story we’ve been hearing for months and nothing changed except that Kansas is subpoenaed, but in reality, we all knew that was going to happen.

Kansas is to big of a program to be taken down. The NCAA just won’t allow it. If these programs go under, the NCAA, a non-profit organization, will lose the millions and millions of dollars of investment that is college sports. It’s just to big to fail.

But should Kansas fans be worried? Not in my mind. They have ran a clean program for years. They haven’t done anything illegal to our knowledge or they’re not doing anything different from every other college program in the nation. We’ll see out it plays out, but Kansas was reported as the victim at first, they’re fully involved in the investigation, they just hired a reliable, respected and established AD and they have a lot in their favor. I’m not worried.