Found an interesting post from a Louisville fan on the Scout board about the penalties in the Louisville case. I thought it was worth sharing and saving for future reference. The post was in response to others saying Louisville should not have self-imposed the ban because, they argued, the NCAA did not even take it into account.
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But it was taken into account. We got off light with only the one year postseason ban we self-imposed. By the NCAA's punishment guidelines, here's what they charged us with:
Charge 1: Level I Aggravated (Institution - Impermissible Benefits)
Charge 2: Level I - Aggravated (McGee failure to cooperate, unethical conduct )
Charge 3: Level II - Aggravated (Williams failure to cooperate)
Charge 4: Level I - standard (Pitino failure to monitor)
Penalties for Level I aggravated according to the 2012 structure (which is more lenient than today's):
Postseason Ban: 2-4 Years. -We only got 1, which we self-imposed.
Financial Penalty(fines, in addition to return of monies collected): Negate revenues from sports program in which violation occurred. -We only return postseason monies, not the whole season's revenues.
Scholarship Reductions: 25-50%. -We got far less than 25%
Show Cause: 5-10 Years -Mcgee got this full force of this, Pitino got none.
Head Coach Suspensions: 50-100% of season. -CRP got far less than half the season.
Recruiting Visits: 25-50% unofficial, 25-50% official (4-6 visits). 20-50% off campus recruiting, 14-26 week ban on all off campus recruiting. -We didn't even get close to this.
Probation: 6-10 Years. Again, we're far under.
And by their own guidelines, this was also to occur (prior to 2013, it was not discretionary to apply this penalty):
(h) Vacation of records in a cases which a student-athlete has competed while ineligible, particularly in cases involving
academic fraud, serious intentional violations, direct involvement of a coach or a high-ranking school
administrator, a large number of violations, competition while academically ineligible, a finding of failure
to monitor or lack of institutional control, a repeat violator, or a case in which vacation or a similar penalty
would be imposed if the underlying violations were secondary. The penalties may include one or more of the
following:
(1) Vacation of individual records and performances;
(2) Vacation of team records and performances, including wins from the career record of the head coach in
the involved sport, or, in applicable cases, reconfiguration of team point totals; or
(3) Return of individual or team awards to the Association.
We got these vacation of records penalties as they proscribed, as per their guidelines. Still, this was a stretch and was always applied very selectively anyway. This was unnecessary, punitive, and they could easily have used the newer guidelines for this portion that makes it far more discretionary from the committee.
So While the vacating of records was over the top, we got off lightly on the other penalties. The fact that we never once had to recruit a single class with a looming postseason ban was HUGE for this program, and self imposing that penalty mid season, while tough to swallow at the time, was the best thing the administration did. Otherwise it would have been this year, or the next two years by rule. So I'm not saying it's good or right, I'm just saying we were supposed to get everything we got AND MORE. So it sure looks like the narrative of "they didn't take our self imposed penalties or cooperation into account" is false- because by the rulebook, we were supposed to have even harsher penalties than we got.