Filed under: Kansas, Sports Business and Media

The plot thickened late last week in the University of Kansas ticket fiasco, as David (right) and Dana Pump — the twin brothers who run high-profile youth basketball camps in Southern California and have a consulting firm that matches coaches with college athletic departments — vehemently denied any involvement in a scheme to scalp hundreds of valuable NCAA tickets over the last decade.

In a statement on Friday to a cbssports.com columnist, the brothers wrote that they have never been contacted by the university or “any governmental entity” regarding illegal ticket sales and claimed they would be “happy to cooperate” with any inquiry into the scandal.

The scam, which was first reported by Yahoo! and confirmed by a Wichita law firm’s investigation of Kansas’ athletic department, centers on a group of Kansas staffers who conspired to sell more than $1 million worth of basketball and football tickets over the last five years. The law firm’s report, however, did not address the claims made in the Yahoo story, which detailed an earlier scalping operation that reportedly involved the sale of Final Four and Big 12 tournament tickets in 2002 and 2003 to clients with connections to the Pump brothers.

The main source for the Yahoo article was David Freeman, a Kansas real estate developer who is a three-time felon and is currently facing jail time on an unrelated bribery charge. Freeman was allegedly the middle-man in the earlier scheme, utilizing his ties with Rodney Jones, Kansas’ former ticket operations manager, and Roger Morningstar, a prominent Kansas graduate and the father of former Jayhawks guard Brady Morningstar, to obtain the university’s allotment of unsold seats. The Pumps, who host an annual retreat for top college coaches and athletic directors, reportedly helped orchestrate the scam by providing buyers and brokers for the tickets.

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