BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) -Indiana basketball waits to see how bad the damage will be.
No sports program at the school has been found guilty of a major NCAA violation since 1960. That could change Tuesday when the infractions committee announces its punishment over improper recruiting telephone calls under former coach Kelvin Sampson.
The governing body has accused the basketball program of major violations stemming from more than 100 impermissible phone calls to recruits made by Sampson and his assistants while Sampson was still on probation for a similar phone-call scandal at Oklahoma.
The most serious charge is failure to monitor, which could carry stiff penalties beyond the sanctions Indiana already has imposed on the basketball program.
13 allowed by NCAA rules after giving up scholarships because of the NCAA investigation probe and poor academic scores.
Indiana officials discovered the violations during an investigation that began in July 2007. It reported the calls to the NCAA but characterized them as secondary violations.
The NCAA disagreed and in February charged the university with five major infractions and accused Sampson of providing false and misleading information to investigators – an allegation Sampson continues to deny. It later downgraded one of those charges to a secondary violation, but it added the failure to monitor charge in June after Indiana officials testified at a hearing on the initial charges.
Indiana has contended it did everything possible to prevent the violations and argues that its self-imposed penalties should be sufficient. Those include stripping scholarships and strict limits on recruiting for Tom Crean, who came from Marquette to take over the Hoosiers program after the university bought out Sampson’s contract for $750,000 in February.
None of Sampson’s assistants was retained, and athletic director Rick Greenspan announced his resignation the same day the failure to monitor charge was filed. He will leave at the end of December and be replaced by Indianapolis attorney Fred Glass.
When Glass was hired last month he said that removing the stain of basketball scandal was a priority.
“Our place is one that has always followed the rules,” Glass said. “I think we can have that again.”
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