NCAA Corruption Trial: Financial Advisor Testifies He Paid Former Penn State Football Player
Update, 5:10 p.m.: Larry Johnson Sr., the only Penn State assistant with a son in the NFL in 2009, denied Marty Blazer’s assertions when he spoke with Yahoo! Sports on Tuesday shortly after the financial planner testified in the NCAA corruption trial.
“That is not accurate at all,” Johnson said. “That is absolutely false. I would never, ever ask anybody to do that. That is not me…All of a sudden this Marty Blazer guy can just say whatever he wants? That is absolutely amazing. Wow.”
Original story: The NCAA men’s basketball corruption trial took a strange turn to Happy Valley, and it has nothing to do with Pat Chambers’ team or the Penn State men’s basketball program under a previous head coach.
During Tuesday’s testimony of Marty Blazer, a Pittsburgh-based financial advisor who has been a key witness in the FBI probe into NCAA sports, he identified the Penn State football program as one of seven NCAA football programs where he paid student-athletes, according to Yahoo Sports columnist Dan Wetzel.
Wetzel reports that Blazer testified that he was contacted by a Penn State assistant in 2009 who was the father of one of Blazer’s NFL clients. The assistant asked Blazer to pay a player $10,000 so that he would not enter the NFL Draft. Blazer complied, handing a $10,000 check to the father of that player, but the player ended up in the 2009 NFL Draft and was selected No. 11 overall.
Blazer didn’t name the assistant or the player in his testimony, but the lone Penn State assistant on the coaching staff in 2009 with a son in the NFL is Larry Johnson Sr., a defensive line coach at Penn State for almost two decades, while the No. 11 pick in the 2009 NFL Draft was Aaron Maybin.
Johnson Sr. is currently defensive line and associate head coach at Ohio State. Maybin played four seasons in the NFL before retiring in 2014.
Blazer said that he paid football players from 2000-2013 at Penn State, Pitt, Michigan, Northwestern, Alabama, Notre Dame, and North Carolina. He testified that his end goal was to become the players’ financial advisor.
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