This summer, from the producers of hits such as "Commission Settles with Motivational Speaker" ...  "SEC Charges Nationally Known Psychic in Multi-Million Dollar Securities Fraud" ... and "SEC Charges Former Professional Baseball Player Doug DeCinces and Three Others with Insider Trading") comes the latest blockbuster in the war against securities fraud committed by people with headline-worthy jobs:

"SEC Charges College Football Hall of Fame Coach in $80 Million Ponzi Scheme"

A big part of the SEC's role is to deter future securities fraud, but you can't achieve much of a deterrent effect if nobody is paying attention. That's why it helps the SEC's cause to have high-profile defendants like "Rudy" Ruettiger or Mark Cuban in otherwise pretty boring cases, or at least someone like Jim Donnan, who was indeed inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2009. (According to Wikipedia, Donnan was the head football coach at Marshall University from 1990-95, where he had five consecutive 11-plus win seasons and won the 1992 NCAA Division I-AA national football championship. He later went on to be head coach of the  University of Georgia from 1996-2000, where he had a respectable 40–19 record but was fired in 2000 after consecutive eight-win seasons. Okay--back to the securities law stuff!).

The SEC claims that Donnan and a business partner solicited investments in a supposed "wholesale liquidation business" that would buy leftover merchandise from major retailers and resell discontinued, damaged, or returned products to discount retailers. They allegedly promised investors rates of return ranging from 50 to 380 percent. Of the $80 million that they allegedly raised from 100 investors, however, the SEC says that only about $12 million was actually used to purchase leftover merchandise, with the remaining funds used to pay fake returns to earlier investors or stolen for other uses by Donnan and his partner.

The SEC's press release about case also allowed the agency to break out not one but two football metaphors in a single sentence. The SEC stated that Donnan and his partner "were merely pulling an old page out of the Ponzi scheme playbook, and the clock eventually ran out.”