The main charge is the honest services fraud. The university is being deprived of its right to honest services. There was a bit on this upthread.
Yes, you had an elaborate and excellent post at the top of page 4, which I've just re-read. I do understand the concept of honest services (Skilling was the first introduction to it that I had), when personal profit for the perpetrator is involved. I get it with respect to kickbacks for public officials (where the public is the victim) or the various stock schemes you'd see with corporate executives (where the company and its shareholders are the victim). The victims in those cases are getting a poorer service (and financial return) than they'd paid for from their agents, as a result of those agents' self-dealing - their lack of
honest services.
Here, Richardson, Miller et al went to some great lengths (and career risk, in flouting the NCAA so blatantly) in order to provide their employer
excellent service. With Ayton as the most obvious example, they successfully steered much greater talent to their university, and thereby success and profits, than would have been at all likely under a coaching staff that scrupulously followed NCAA rules. Every player they bribed to secure their matriculation was going to go to college anyway, and receive a federal scholarship anyway. The only difference is
where. And the only people who care where he goes are the students and alums who get to watch him play for their team (or not). So, who's the victim? What tangible harm has been caused, and absent that, whose intangible right to honest services has been infringed upon?
Then we come to all the other charges just unsealed. Mail fraud? Wire fraud? I'd expect to see that in a kickback scheme or gambling scandal. But those are crimes with tangible harm attached. Where is that harm?
A major oversimplification: The schools also participate in federal loan programs. Fraud that endangers the school's ability to possibly pay back federal funds is essentially defrauding the government. Also, student athletes may receive Pell Grants. A student that receives $100,000--well, technically, that means that student wouldn't be eligible that Pell Grant--having $100,000 in assets is going to jack up one's EFC. You've participated in defrauding the federal government's grant program.
OK, following along, the school's ability to pay back federal loans is contingent on the students to whom they award those loans being properly eligible for them. Or, if I understand you, something about their (eventual) ability to repay the loan being properly represented. What about their eligibility, or repayment abilities, has shifted as a result of these revelations?
If any of the recruits bribed to attend these universities were receiving Pell Grants that the bribes would have made them ineligible for, that's coherent to me as a charge. It's in the category of a gangster going down for tax evasion, but I can at least see how the marginal awardee of a Pell Grant is a victim here. Somehow I doubt the students in question are in the Pell bucket, though, especially since their room and board is getting paid for with the university's own scholarship "funds" (no actual funds change hands, of course, because 'scholarships' are just price discrimination between different classes of customer, but that's a digression). It's kinda a left hand / right hand thing, no? The financial aid office steers this discretionary bit or that discretionary bit, plus whatever fund is set aside for athletic scholarships, to make up the "package" and the kid signs it.
edit: I guess what feels a bit icky here is that nobody criticizes a high school senior for going to a school that offers the best price for a college education, or the best value for that education. But the minute that student crosses the break-even point, and goes from paying dollars to attend to making a personal profit on that decision of where to go, bring down the full weight of the federal law enforcement on them! For the tiny group of people where the school needs them more than they need the school, where they're viewed as "the product" rather than as "the customer", it seems we're saying the practice of boosters paying them to attend is not only against the rules of some silly Victorian-era classist idea of amateurism, but it's also criminal. How
dare they take the best financial deal for themselves when marketing their talents, and how
dare the coaches use what resources are at their disposal to put the best product on court and on TV.
I just kind of think of the whole pool of resources (from both the school and the boosters, and the shoe companies) as being part of what a given athletic director can steer towards his goals, and make part of the compensation package for his coaching staff to incentivize them. So this kinda feels like some factory general manager just had a budget meeting, and when he decided the break room was going to get a face lift this year, the SWAT team came in through the windows and hauled him away, because someone thought he should have bumped wages instead.