The NCAA has accused the University of Mississippi of serious athletic violations that may or may not include academic fraud and individual dishonest conduct.
Ole Miss received a notice of these allegations Jan. 29. They included 28 total violations and involved teams in three different sports.
The NCAA began investigating Ole Miss in 2012 when women’s basketball coach Adrian Wiggins and two assistants were fired due to academic and recruiting misconduct.
Early results of the investigations have already deemed two players ineligible. After this, the school self-imposed a one year postseason ban.
“Outside counsel for the University of Mississippi received a notice of allegations from the NCAA – another step in a more than three-year process,” Ross Bjork, Ole Miss athletics director, said in a statement Jan. 30.
The violations range from Level I (severe breach of conduct), Level II (significant breach of conduct) and Level III (breach of conduct). According to the NCAA, examples of Level I violations include lack of institutional control, academic fraud and individual unethical or dishonest conduct.
Initially it was believed that most of the allegations involved were in women’s basketball and track and field and most of the football-related allegations occurred during the era of former football coach Houston Nutt.
The latest reports coming out of Ole Miss confirm that 13 of the 28 violations involved football, including nine during the Hugh Freeze era. Freeze, who was hired in 2011 to replace Nutt, currently has a 34-18 record for the Rebels while bringing in two top-5 recruiting classes in the past four years (2013 and 2016).
“To be clear, the NCAA has only brought allegations, and as part of the NCAA process, the University and others have 90 days to issue a response,” Bjork said. “We’ve been transparent throughout this process, and it is important to note that most of the football allegations are based upon facts that have been publicly disclosed previously in self-reports and reinstatement requests or have been reported publicly in connection with another NCAA case.”
Out of the nine violations against the football team, five revolved around star left tackle Laremy Tunsil, four involved Nutt (specifically former assistant coach David Saunders) and four resulted from a violation of the “bump rule,” an unscheduled and illegal contact between a college coach and a prospective student-athlete.
Tunsil was suspended seven games during the 2015 season after the NCAA found that the player received improper benefits such as the use of three loaner cars over a six-month period. Saunders, who was an assistant under Nutt in 2010, left Ole Miss to take an assistant coach job at Louisiana-Lafayette. He resigned in November 2014 amid an NCAA probe at Louisiana-Lafayette.
The NCAA gave Saunders an eight-year show-cause after it was found that the assistant coach made an effort to arrange fraudulent college entrance exam scores for recruits.
Louisiana-Lafayette did not receive a postseason ban, but the school was put on athletic probation for two years and lost 11 scholarships over three seasons as a result of the probe.
Other violations involving the Ole Miss football team were self reported by the school already, including an assistant coach making improper contact with a high school recruit, and an alleged representative of athletics interests offering transportation for potential recruits on six different occasions from 2011 to 2014.
The University of Memphis is no stranger to NCAA violations. In 2009, the NCAA forced the Memphis men’s basketball team to vacate its record 38-victory season because former Tigers star Derrick Rose was ruled academically ineligible for having another person take his SAT. Although the NCAA Committee on Infractions did not reveal the name of the player, Rose was the only player to fit the description.
The NCAA has not yet punished Ole Miss athletics for these violations. However, it is assumed that Ole Miss will dodge any severe punishments because the school self-reported many of the violations and self-imposed a seven-game suspension on Tunsil in 2015.
The U of M football team defeated Ole Miss during their matchup at the Liberty Bowl in 2015. The two teams will face each other again in 2016 in Oxford.
