A ticket scalping scandal has been uncovered at the University of Kansas, where high-ranking members of the athletic department helped broker deals that made over $800,000 in profits on the sale of basketball and football tickets.
Yahoo! Sports writers Jason King, Charles Robinson and Dan Wetzel broke the story, and KU issued its own report based on an independent investigation.
“I accept responsibility because I’m the athletic director and this happened under my watch,” Kansas AD Lew Perkins said. “It’s not easy to learn that people you trusted let you down. We thought we had every safeguard in place. Nobody picked up on it. I certainly didn’t. It caught me totally off-guard.”
The swindle was orchestrated by Dana and David Pump, power brokers in the college football world, along with two Lawrence businessmen and six former employees in the KU athletic department, key among them former assistant athletics director Rodney Jones.
Now it appears the ticket scandal has legs back to the Oklahoma athletics department, where two of the KU employees also worked in the Oklahoma ticketing offices. Tom and Charlette Blubaugh both were employees of the OU athletic department, with Tom Blubaugh the director of tickets in 2003. Kansas’ internal report alludes that the Blubaughs had passed money back and forth while in Norman, using income from tickets to supplement their salary.
As our good friend The Wiz notes, Perkins is an athletic director that was unapologetic for being paid a ridiculous $85,000 a week to run the Jayhawk sports empire. Being asleep at the wheel for one of the biggest ticket fraud cases should have the university president considering the dismissal of the guy who gets paid enough not to be “caught off-guard” while multiple employees under his watch divvied out nearly a million dollars worth of premium tickets.
After all, this was the guy who fired Mark Mangino for having a bad temper and treating his players poorly...