The NCAA has banned the SMU men’s basketball team from the 2016 postseason and suspended head coach Larry Brown for nine games of the team’s 2015-16 season, reports Jeff Goodman of ESPN. The report cites anonymous sources. Brown led Kansas to a national title in 1988, but the Jayhawks were banned from postseason play the following year due to recruiting violations.
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In March, the NCAA hit Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim with a nine-game ACC regular-season suspension after an investigation found that the school and longtime coach did not control and monitor its athletic programs. But that appearance was vacated after two of his players were found to have been ineligible. Frazier is now on the Mustangs’ roster. “He learned about the violation after it occurred, but he did not promptly report the issue and was not clear about the violation with the NCAA’s enforcement staff when he was first interviewed by the NCAA”. It was one it turned out he didn’t need once the high school transcripts came in, the source said.
The harsh punishment comes 28 years after the NCAA meted out its “death penalty” to the SMU football team.
The Head Coach Accountability rules was put in place to punish head coaches who, historically, have remained an arm’s distance away from NCAA violations but had assistant coaches or staff members breaking rules.
SMU basketball seemed to be on their way back to relevancy for the first time in a while under head coach Larry Brown last season.
But success under Brown has always led to NCAA investigators poking around on campus.
SMU’s administrators have to shoulder a few of the responsibility for this mess because they knew the risks when they hired Brown three years ago.
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The NCAA is expected to formally announce the sanctions later on Tuesday.
