Howdy and happy Wednesday!
If I were to pick one takeaway from last night’s resounding election results, it’s that people are truly tired of public officials betraying their responsibility to serve the greater good.
The government doesn’t exist so a small, venal slice of people can enact petty revenge and sycophantically serve the country’s most powerful. It is here for us.
And we, the people, are its watchdog.
Also yes, war and inflation, but I don’t cover those beats.
Speaking of public goods being wrested away from us by shadowy cabals, college football is doing its best to remove itself from any oversight.
Universities have started shifting their athletics departments to private LLCs, a change cloaked in concern over the sport’s shifting landscape.
Really, they are the first step in taking college football fully private. Don’t take my word for it; listen to the guy who designs them.
In an interview last year, attorney Clay Grayson, who built these structures for Michigan State, Virginia Tech, and Kentucky, admitted that, calling them “true privatization.”
“If I have this vehicle, I'm not necessarily under the Freedom of Information kind of stuff because I’m in a for-profit model,” Grayson said. “And oh, by the way, I could sell stock to private equity.”
There you go.
Officially, only one school has taken on investment from an outside firm: Utah. In its announcement, the school said all the right things about not “selling parts of our athletics department,” and not “ceding operational control to a third party.”
I have concerns. Especially because, when the school first authorized the agreement, the Utes for-profit LLCs were registered by someone who served two different federal prison sentences over charges of felony embezzlement and more than 30 counts of wire fraud.
First off, big game this week for the Utes! Undefeated Utah takes on one-loss BYU. Both teams are in the top ten of the just-released CFP rankings. Holy cow, Holy War.
Back in June, Utah revealed the final form its partnership with private equity firm Otro Capital would take: A new entity called Crimson Brand Partners. Details of the deal still haven’t been released, but sources estimate the influx of cash could be over $100 million.
According to Utah business filings, Crimson Brand Partners is managed by David Anderson, CEO of the university’s foundation, which the LLC will operate under.
That venture was incorporated in Delaware in January, but wasn’t registered in Utah until a few weeks prior to the press release.
Before that, the arrangement took a few different iterations for reasons that have never been explained.
The university’s resolution approving the deal authorized the creation of Utah Brands & Entertainment. Both the resolution and the formation of Utah Brands & Entertainment occurred on the same day: Dec. 9, 2025.
A month later, in another news release, the school said the name of the for-profit company had changed to Utah Brand Initiatives.
That company didn’t exist yet. It was registered in Utah three weeks later.
Oddly, though, the school didn’t roll Utah Brands & Entertainment over to Utah Brand Initiatives, or either one to Crimson Brand Partners. Both still exist.
Neither of those two companies is registered to any individual with the school. And the businesses aren’t tied to any university addresses.
Instead, they are registered to a business that operates out of a residential home in Sandy, Utah: Pimco Management.
Pimco Management is operated by David Pimm, the son of former Utah men’s basketball coach Jerry Pimm. And David Pimm has a long list of financial crimes to his name.
In a 2004 Deseret News article about Jerry Pimm’s son coaching local basketball, David Pimm was described as an accountant for a local architecture firm.
Three years later, Pimm was charged in federal court with one count each of wire fraud and embezzlement, accused of stealing from a bank account tied to that same architecture firm. According to the indictment, Pimm misrepresented donations going to the company’s 401(k) program to hide withdrawals. He pled guilty to one count of wire fraud and was sentenced to 21 months in prison. A petition to reduce the length of his supervised probation was later denied by a judge.
In 2014, in state court in Nevada, Pimm was charged with five felony counts of theft, a judge later noting the money was stolen “from his employer.” He pled down to a misdemeanor conspiracy to commit theft charge and received a one-year suspended jail sentence.
A year later, Pimm was again charged in federal court on 11 counts of aiding and abetting wire fraud and one count of conspiracy. He and an accomplice were accused of faking purchases at a vehicle auction clearinghouse he worked at, profiting from the actual sales. Pimm pled guilty to two counts of wire fraud and got 60 months' probation.
In 2018, while on probation, Pimm was indicted by federal authorities for the third time, on 19 counts of access device fraud, accused of making unauthorized transfers from his employer's bank account to himself.
Pimm pled guilty to one count and was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison (with a concurrent sentence for his previous conviction added on). Across the four cases, Pimm was ordered to pay about $200,000 in restitution.
According to court records, his supervised release would have ended in late 2024. But in 2020, Pimm again petitioned to be let out early. A judge shot that down, citing his past.
“Pimm has, for more than a decade, consistently engaged in essentially the same criminal conduct: stealing money from his employers by means of fraud and deception. Pimm's criminal history and the nature of his crimes demonstrate he continues to be a threat to the community.”
“He has a significant and serious criminal history of fraud and has fallen short of complete candor to the court,” the judge wrote, worrying he would engage in “similar conduct” if released.
I don’t know about you, but that’s not the kind of person I’d want anywhere near the entities I was creating to take on $100 million in investment.
Does any of that mean Utah sought out a dubious accountant to devise some elaborate scheme, creating a series of companies intended to obfuscate the exact nature of the deal?
Registering these LLCs for the school doesn’t give Pimm any control over them. He’s just a vehicle to file documents with the state, essentially.
At the exact same time, there are many, many, many firms and professionals who could have handled these transactions, who haven’t been lambasted by a federal judge for spending a decade doing financial fraud. Instead, they picked and (probably paid) him.
Gotta be some reason!
The problem is we don’t know. Utah is notoriously bad at complying with public records law. Numerous reporters have asked for documents regarding the Otro Capital deal, requests that are almost a year old. No one has gotten anything back.
The school is saying you don’t get to know.
It could be all on the level. But when trust in our institutions is at an all-time low, having someone like this help register several businesses behind the first-ever private equity deal for a public university’s athletics department, marking a seismic shift in college sports…
Do you want to give them the benefit of the doubt?
Public universities are counting on you not paying attention. Right as they move your favorite sport into private hands.
FOIAball refuses to look away.
But I can’t do it without your support. All I need from you is the cost of one dang Budweiser at a bar. That’s it. One beer a month keeps this site alive.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see ya tomorrow!
Swoop via Chris Gardner / Contributor / Getty
