Former Adidas executive reveals crazy story involving Kentucky, former Florida Gators coach Billy Donovan

Merl Code, a former Nike-turned-Adidas executive will be going to federal prison sometime in the near future. He doesn’t know when or where, but one thing he knows all too well is about college basketball’s behind closed doors bribery schemes throughout the last decade.

“[I was] the bogeyman,” Code told Dan Wetzel and me Monday on our podcast, the College Football Enquirer. “But I wasn’t the bogeyman [federal investigators] wanted. They wanted high-profile names. They wanted Sean Miller. They wanted Will Wade. They wanted Rick Pitino.” Code joined Sports Illustrated to discuss his new book, Black Market: An Insider’s Journey Into the High-Stakes World of College Basketball. Here is a snippet one of the stories:

He noted that he traveled from Chicago to Lexington, Kentucky to secure a five-figure payment to Anthony Davis during his record-breaking freshman season at Kentucky. When Davis’ father lost his job once Davis moved down to Lexington, Nike via Code stepped in and helped out.

“When I was on the pro side at Nike, I made numerous trips to Kentucky to see guys like Rajon Rondo, Eric Bledsoe, John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins and a few others. I had some solid relationships with folks in Lexington, so the first call I made was to a former assistant athletic director. He was no longer working in that capacity, but he was super connected to some heavy hitters,” Code said.

“He thought on it and came back to me with a creative idea. He knew some guys that ran an apparel shop. ‘What if they created a T-shirt design? Would the family be okay if they got a healthy amount of the profits from the sales, so long as they don’t come back and sue us? We wanna make a play on his unibrow.’”

The unibrow shirts were made and it generated millions for Nike and benefitted everyone — except Davis, though according to Code drove from Chicago to Bloomington, Indiana met the assistant athletic director, received an envelope of cash and then delivered it to Davis’s mom before the game against the Hoosiers. Kentucky would end up losing at the buzzer to Christian Watford in a now-infamous shot.

“These are really good people,” Code said of Davis’ family. “That kid and his family deserved an opportunity to live without constantly worrying about keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table, especially while AD was generating tens of millions of dollars for everyone except himself. … I have no qualms about what we did to help them. Now, with athletes being permitted to profit off their names, images and likenesses, I actually feel vindicated in helping that family in the way that we did. It was the right thing to do—to hell with what the NCAA would have said at the time.”

Enter then-Florida Gators head coach Billy Donovan, who had some choice words for Code and the other Nike executives for playing favorites with Kentucky and Oregon in particular. Every other school had to wait their turn behind the two heavyweights.

Code’s recalled Donovan’s rant, saying, “I’m sick and tired of this bulls—! You motherf—-rs keep helping Kentucky! This shit is ridiculous. I’m gonna call [Nike cofounder] Phil Knight personally to talk about this s— because it’s getting out of hand.”

Code wrote: “I stayed quiet while Billy vented, because I knew there was some truth in what he was saying. With John Calipari getting an overabundance of the top recruits in the country at the time, Florida and every other program were fighting for scraps. One of the worst-kept secrets in the business was Nike’s emphasis on helping Kentucky and Oregon, Phil Knight’s alma mater, with everyone else falling in line after.”

After being held at gunpoint by investigators and police officers while opening his front door in 2017, he was caught red handed and now is set to do his time in the near future.