LAWRENCE, Kan. — There was no reason to suspect anything was wrong at the University of Kansas. The teams were winning, the stands were full, the donor money continued to roll in.
But behind the scenes, working side by side within the athletic department, a group of six employees had allegedly hatched a lucrative ticket-scalping scheme.
Details of the scam were outlined Wednesday in a report that found the “inappropriate” sale of at least $1 million worth of basketball and football tickets to brokers over the last five years, leaving officials at the Big 12 school embarrassed.
“Being on the athletics side, the simplest way to try to describe this is that there was a curveball thrown and I missed it,” said Kansas athletic director Lew Perkins.
The investigation said five KU athletic department staffers and a consultant — all of them no longer employed by the school — sold or used at least 17,609 men’s basketball tickets, 2,181 football tickets and a number of parking passes and other passes for personal purposes. The report showed over $887,000 in basketball tickets and more than $122,000 worth of football tickets were involved.
