It's absolutely wild to me that Avenatti thought he could blackmail Nike in the first place... but *especially* that he thought he could blackmail Nike with information that will all eventually be public anyway due to the FBI investigation. Everyone already knew Ayton, Bol, and McCoy had been paid since the FBI's initial announcement about Christian Dawkins IIRC (Ayton and McCoy were definitely on there, at least). It's interesting to see how they knew and what types of evidence they're using to build a case... but there's nothing new in there, really, so I just don't understand Avenatti's endgame here.

He continues to tease out these Zion Williamson allegations without providing any evidence or documents to back up this, the only new/explosive claim he's made. If you're facing jail time for trying to extort Nike, and then you keep hinting that you'll reveal something about Nike in the future... that *can't* be helping your case. Especially since, as we already saw with the Ayton/Bol/McCoy stuff, it's exceedingly likely that the FBI has any documents pertaining Zion's families interactions with Nike already anyway.

So either:
a) Avenatti's got the goods on Zion's mom, but so does the FBI, so it doesn't matter, or
b) Avenatti knows there's no hard evidence on Zion's mom and just wants to tarnish Nike/Zion publicly out of spite before heading to jail.

As a Duke fan, I obviously *hope* b is the case, lol. Either way, nothing to do but wait and see.

Same for seeing which coaches get implicated across D1 and which don't-- a surprisingly low number of coaches, even assistants, have been connected to this case to date. It'd be great if, like, sixty coaches were implicated so that the NCAA really had the lid ripped off of it, and they'd have to seriously reconsider everything they've been doing. Something like that would expedite the movement for players to get paid somehow, imo. My fear is this investigation will *actually* implicate 3-4 head coaches and a few assistants, but it'll mostly just be shoe company execs, AAU folks, agents, and player family members, so the NCAA will dismiss the coaches as "a few bad eggs" and everything will proceed business as usual.

My movies: http://russellhainline.com
My movie reviews: https://letterboxd.com/RussellHFilm/
My beer TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thebeertravelguide