The school said it was studying the report and would decide within two weeks whether to appeal.
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The SMU men’s basketball team will be banned from postseason play in 2016 and will have nine scholarships reduced over the next three years.
As part of his suspension, Brown will have to attend a regional rules seminar over the next two years, reports Goodman. He also noted this is the third time a Brown-led team has faced sanctions, with the previous instances occurring at Kansas and UCLA.
“Still, there was a violation in our program and I take responsibility for that and offer my honest apologies to the university community”.
First, Brown has been tangled up in NCAA allegations twice before.
The sanctions come at a tough time for SMU’s program, which had experienced a renaissance after Brown’s hire in 2012.
“He’s different than me, so we all have our individual ways to get there”. During the course of the investigation, I was being interviewed by the NCAA and they blindsided me with a question and I answered it. And after thinking about it a while I asked to be excused. It’s one thing if you want to penalize me.
According to ESPN, the infractions that Brown inhibited were committed by former assistant coach Ulrich Malgi. When he was the head coach at UCLA from 1979-81, his team’s final four season was vacated because two of his players were found academically ineligible. SMU is expected to appeal the ruling. “The committee held him responsible”.
Both cases involved charges of a head coach failing to monitor a member of his staff.
SMU athletics, meanwhile, is most known for its NCAA troubles too, as the football team was destroyed by the NCAA’s death penalty in 1986. Brown was suspended for nine games; the NCAA issued a scathing report Tuesday that placed blame on the 75-year-old coach for multiple infractions tied to academic fraud – including lying to NCAA investigators.
In addition, the Mustangs will also face recruiting punishments.
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The NCAA’s investigation discovered that former assistant Ulric Maligi “encouraged [Keith Frazier] to enroll in an online course to meet NCAA initial eligibility standards and be admitted to the university”. Brown did not have an immediate tie-in with the case of the academic fraud, but he did fail to report the incident to the proper staff for more than a month after learning what happened, as also stated in the report.
