'I was pushing Christian Dawkins on what Rick Pitino knew': Director Pat Kondelis on new HBO documentary

Pat Kondelis, Director of 'The Scheme' joins Yahoo FInance's On The Move panel to share an inside look on his HBO documentary.

Video Transcript

- Docuseries, you'll be watching next year. Documentary you'll be we watching next. There is one coming to HBO called "The Scheme," which looks at one of the biggest collegiate criminal cases in college sports history, involving the NCAA and a gentleman named Christian Dawkins.

We're joined by the filmmaker for that project right now, "The Scheme." Pat Kondelis, or Kondelis, is joining us right now. Pat, how did you come to this project? What attracted you to it, and what did you think sort of needed to be focused on, and told, that did not perhaps come out at the time?

PAT KONDELIS: Well yes, I came into this project really because I had heard the story. I heard when the Southern District of New York, and the FBI, had this huge press conference announcing that there was a three-year undercover FBI investigation. And they had arrested Adidas executives, and it looks like this was really going to change college athletics moving forward, and then just nothing happened.

And Peter Nelson of HBO Sports gave me a call, and we were talking about doing some other projects. And he brought up this topic. And I jumped at the chance to actually sit down with Christian Dawkins. And when I did sit down with Christian Dawkins, I thought it would be an absolutely fascinating and engaging character, far different from the way that I think of trade and articles surrounding the news of what had really gone on.

And as we started to dig into this, it was a much bigger story than just a basketball story, and a corruption story. And I think that's ultimately what we wanted to show to the audience here, was how this whole crazy story came to be.

DAN ROBERTS: Pat, Dan Roberts here. Thanks for coming on. As you mentioned, when the story broke it was so interesting to people. But I also feel like the response, largely from the sports world, was well of course. We already knew this was happening.

And everyone suspects that this problem is rampant, that the idea big recruits getting paid in some kind of way, and bribery being an issue, not just in basketball. I agree with you. It's not just a basketball story. I think it's kind of an NCAA story, and a college athletic story.

But what do you think people get wrong or, misunderstand about this story, this news event? Is there any kind of misconception, or angle to this, that you guys try to show in the film that you think people missed in terms of when they followed the story as it played out in real time?

PAT KONDELIS: I think the biggest thing that people didn't understand was the origin of the investigation, right? The origin of this, the amount of resources that went into this three year undercover FBI investigation. And then, and now there's a legal precedent that's been set here. Where if you break an NCAA rules, which the NCAA is not a government body, it's a nonprofit organization.

And effectively, the FBI and the Southern District of New York is saying if you violate an NCAA rule, you could potentially be convicted of a felony. And for a felony-- for a crime actually occurred, you have to have a victim. So the narrative that the prosecutors, and the FBI kind of spun here was that these major college universities that are getting hundreds of millions of dollars in sponsorship from shoe companies, are somehow victimized when these shoe companies are then paying players under the table so that these schools can get the top recruits.

All of that is mind boggling. It's all-- there's a lot of dark humor in this story. And it just seems absurd, I think, from an objective viewpoint here, that any of this happened the way that it did.

- Hey Patrick. I want to talk to you about maybe a common denominator between the scheme and the Tiger King, which we were just talking about. Which is that hey, you know you got this moment in time where people are stuck at home, and they are looking for things to watch. They're looking for things that are completely different.

I know you were going to premiere at South By, right? And then you got yanked right, because it closed. So that's got to be a disappointment. On the other hand, you're going into this environment. And maybe you'll get more people watching, right?

PAT KONDELIS: Yeah, I mean I hope so. I hope that's the case. Yeah, we were supposed to premiere at South by Southwest. That didn't happen. It premiered on HBO Tuesday night, and it's streaming on HBO now. And I'm curious to see, you know, what-- what the viewership is going to be.

I don't-- I have no idea. You know, initially I think HBO was thinking this is going to air right in the middle of the NCAA tournament that was supposed to be happening. So who knows? Who knows? But you know, we're trying to find the positive in anything. So hopefully, hopefully we get more viewers.

- It's a substitute for sports, actually, too, right? Instead of live sports, we have this show.

- You know, you can only talk about Tom Brady going to Tampa Bay for so long. And I mean, the coverage that he has gotten on that is just unbelievable. So yes, if people want to talk about something else besides NFL draft, or whatever. Again, it's not just solely a sports story.

But it's an unbelievable story. It's bigger than that. And I think it's going to be eye-opening to a lot of people that followed the case, and thought they knew the case. And hopefully, to people that don't know anything about it.

DAN ROBERTS: Hey Pat, Dan again. Let me just say that on social media, there's already kind of positive response to the film. If there's one criticism out there I'm seeing, it's a number of people saying it looks like Louisville comes out kind of unscathed from the film, or Rick Pitino as well.

I want to give you a chance. Do you have any response to that? Or is that something that you guys made as a conscious decision, focused more on Dawkins? Did you think about kind of the Louisville element, or also maybe the Adidas, the sports apparel brand element to this?

PAT KONDELIS: Yeah, no. I mean, I think look there's-- everything that we talk about in the documentary, we had to corroborate with evidence. And one of the most contentious parts between me and Christian in there was that I was pushing him on information pertaining to Rick Pitino, and what Rick Pitino knew.

And Christian was steadfast. And look, I don't think he knew what was going on. I found that very, very, difficult to believe. But considering I mean, we get into the past transgressions in Louisville in that. I mean, I think somebody in the documentary says they're historically one of the dirtiest schools in the history of the NCAA.

We detail the prostitution scandal that they had with their basketball program just the year before. Which is also interesting, that again, the government holds Louisville up to be a victim in all of this, which was absurd. But we could not corroborate any information, or the fact that Rick Pitino knew about it, about Brian Bowen getting paid on $1,000 from Adidas to go to Louisville.

So that's why a lot of that stuff is not in there. There's a million different tangents in the story that we could have gone down. Most of them are dead ends. And if we couldn't find the evidence to back it up, we just tried to avoid it as much as we could.

- Pat, thank you for joining us to talk us through this. I know quite a few college basketball fans who are going to be very avidly watching you. Appreciate it. Pat, is it Kondelis?

PAT KONDELIS: Kondelis.

- Kondelis. Thank you so much, maker of "The Scheme" which will be available on HBO. Thank you.

PAT KONDELIS: Thank you.