Texas Southern football and men’s basketball teams were banned by the NCAA from the postseason Tuesday, saying it came close to levying the so-called ”death penalty” against the school for repeated rules violations that included playing 129 athletes who were ineligible and for lying about imposing sanctions on its own.
The Division I Infractions Committee said it found a lack of institutional control at the historically black college, and outlined problems spanning 13 sports over a seven-year period, including booster-related recruiting violations, academic improprieties, the use of ineligible athletes and exceeding scholarship limits.
The basketball team, currently coached by former Indiana coach Mike Davis, was banned from the 2012-13 postseason and the football team in both 2013 and 2014.
Other penalties include five years of probation, scholarship limitations in football and basketball, and the vacating of all team records from 2006-10 in all sports, as well as the 2010-11 records for football and women’s soccer. In 2010, Texas Southern won its first Southwestern Athletic Conference football championship since 1968.
The NCAA said the university allowed a total of 129 student-athletes to compete and receive financial aid and travel expenses when they were ineligible. The majority of these student-athletes had not met progress toward degree or transfer requirements, the report said.
The committee also deemed Texas Southern a ”double repeat violator,” because the athletics program has either been on probation or had violations occurring on campus, or both, for 16 of the past 20 years. The school had said in the past that it was self-imposing sanctions, but the committee found that it had not – a factor in the severity of the new sanctions.
”That’s a unique circumstance,” said Greg Sankey, a member of the infractions committee and the chief operating officer of the Southeastern Conference. ”That may be the most notable piece of the institution’s past circumstances.”
The SWAC does not send its teams to the FCS football playoffs, but it does have a conference championship game and in the past teams that have been banned from postseason play by the NCAA were not allowed to compete in the league title game.
The NCAA levied heavy sanctions on Texas Southern’s softball and tennis programs in 2008. The softball program was placed on four years of probation and was banned from postseason play in 2009. The men’s and women’s tennis programs were disbanded in the spring of 2007.
Texas Southern fired athletic director Alois Blackwell in February 2008 a year after the school received five academic performance warning letters from the NCAA. Former Prairie View athletic director Charles McClelland took the Texas Southern job in April 2008, and he hired a compliance consultant to clean up the department.
Sankey said the school’s recidivist status raised the possibility of a ”death penalty,” which bans a school from competing in a particular sport. The NCAA has used it only once, against SMU’s football program in the 1980s.
Sankey said the cooperation from McClelland and school President John Rudley helped persuade the committee not to consider the death penalty in this case.
