The Division I Infractions Committee found a lack of institutional control and outlined widespread violations, spanning 13 sports over a seven-year period in a report released Tuesday. Other penalties include five years' probation, scholarship limitations in football and basketball and the vacating of all team records from the 2006-10 in all sports, and including 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 report said. 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. The school received five academic performance warning letters from the NCAA in 2007. Former Prairie View Athletics Director Charles McClelland took the Texas Southern job in April 2008, and he hired a compliance consultant to clean up the school's department.
Sankey said the school's recidivist status raised the possibility of a "death penalty," the rarely used punishment that bans a school from competing in a particular sport. The NCAA used it to shut down SMU's football program for the 1987 season.
Sankey said the cooperation from McClelland and president John Rudley helped persuade the committee not to consider the death penalty in this case.
"That was a factor in the committee's evaluation in the application of these penalties," Sankey said.
The most prominent violations involved former football coach Johnnie Cole and former basketball coach Tony Harvey. Cole was fired in April 2011, and Harvey resigned after the 2011-12 season. The committee noted "particularly serious violations" occurred when Cole "knowingly allowed a booster to recruit for the football program" and Harvey "provided false or misleading information during the investigation."
Specifically, the report said that Cole and former assistants "were all aware that a booster was contacting potential transfers and their parents." The booster also bought an airline ticket for a recruit's girlfriend. The committee said Cole and his staff encouraged the booster's efforts and failed to contact the NCAA about possible rules violations related to the booster's activities.
The men's basketball team, meanwhile, offered two scholarships that were unavailable after the program was penalized for poor academic performance. During the 2009-10 season, the team also did not adhere to restrictions on practice time, which were imposed after the team fell short on its academic progress report.
Both coaches were ordered to attend a rules seminar, ethics training and are prohibited from any recruiting activities connected to Texas Southern.
The committee also found that the university exceeded financial aid limits between 2008-11.
"Compounding the problems with oversight was that no squad lists were produced by the compliance office during the years the violations occurred," the report said.
The committee concluded that Texas Southern "lacked institutional control" due to its failure to design safeguards to prevent violations, monitor academic standards and keep track of scholarships. The school "insufficiently investigated academic issues that involved 24 student-athletes and allowed 12 of the 24 student-athletes to receive unearned academic credit."
Sankey praised Rudley and McClelland for their efforts to fix the athletics department.
"There has been a different level of attention and activity among the university's current leadership," he said.
