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The Honolulu Advertiser
Updated at 11:46 a.m., Tuesday, November 25, 2008

CBKB: NCAA hands Hoosiers 3 years probation, no penalties

By MARK ALESIA and TERRY HUTCHENS
The Indianapolis Star

Indiana University will receive three years probation from the NCAA for recruiting violations under former men's basketball coach Kelvin Sampson but will not be further penalized, sources close to the investigation told The Indianapolis Star on Tuesday.

The infractions committee accepted IU's self-administered sanctions, including a loss of a scholarship for this season and extended recruiting limitations, as sufficient. The school was found guilty of "failure to monitor" the program, said a source who has read the NCAA's report, but the committee used softer language than in the original accusation.

Sampson, now an assistant with the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks, was given a five-year "show cause" penalty, which essentially prevents NCAA schools from hiring him. Rob Senderoff, a former Indiana assistant and now an assistant at Kent State, was given a three-year show cause penalty. It's not yet clear how he will be affected.

The official announcement will come in a teleconference with reporters at 4 p.m. Tuesday.

"I don't want to say it's a reprieve for Indiana, but they're being seen by the NCAA as much less culpable," said Michael McCann, a sports law expert from Vermont Law School. "Maybe this is their reward for being forthcoming, and it's a message to other schools: Be honest and you won't be punished nearly as much. The steps Indiana took appear to be the right ones."

Probation is defined by the NCAA rulebook as "designed on a case-by-case basis to focus on the institution's administrative weaknesses." It is supposed to include written reports from the school to the infractions committee and in-person reviews of the school's compliance policies by an NCAA administrator.

However, in a yearlong study released last month by the infractions committee on possible changes in enforcement policy, committee members said that in actual practice, written reports and in-person checks "have never been imposed as mandatory in all cases."

If a school fails to satisfy the terms of probation, the infractions committee may extend the probation and impose new sanctions.

The case has brought a torrent of bad publicity to a school that had not been found guilty of a major NCAA violation since 1960. It also decimated the basketball program for this season.

Senderoff and Sampson resigned, and after the failure-to-monitor charge was added to the original charges in June, athletic director Rick Greenspan resigned effective at the end of this calendar year. Several players transferred or were dismissed, and the team returned just one scholarship player — a former walk-on — from last season.

Further, new coach Tom Crean was forced to operate under recruiting restrictions that carried over from the former staff, although they were relaxed somewhat. Still, Crean recruited what is widely considered to be one of the nation's top classes for 2009-10.

IU's self-imposed penalties included one scholarship loss for the current season and a variety of recruiting restrictions. Those restrictions involved extra limitations on the number of phone calls coaches could make to recruits, which coaches make the calls, when the coaches could travel to recruit and the number of expenses-paid "official" visits to campus by recruits.