NCAA releases list of Oklahoma State football sanctions
The NCAA announced the findings of its investigation into Oklahoma State’s football team and the biggest penalty the Cowboys received may be the four-year football ban of its Orange Pride program.
The investigation started after a series of articles from Sports Illustrated in the fall of 2013 about alleged NCAA violations within the program. The articles said there was a pay for play system set up, players were in a “weed circle,” there was cheating and detailed the role of hostesses in the recruitment of athletes.
This case stemmed from a series of articles published about alleged NCAA violations. The university alerted the NCAA to the allegations and a cooperative investigation began. More than 50,000 emails and other documents were reviewed and nearly 90 interviews of current and former student-athletes, coaches, staff and boosters were conducted. The investigation determined that many of the allegations from the series of articles were unfounded; however, the panel concluded that the university violated its drug testing policy and committed recruiting violations.
The line about the allegations being unfounded is not new. In October, the NCAA and Oklahoma State released a joint statement saying the same thing.
The NCAA said that OSU didn’t follow its own written policies for students who had positive drug tests and “the athletics director believed he had latitude in the application of the policy and deferred to the head football coach’s recommendation on whether to suspend student-athletes who failed a drug test. As a result, five football student-athletes competed in a total of seven games when they should have been withheld from competition.”
The NCAA findings also said the Orange Pride program, an all-female group who hosts recruits during visits to the school, “engaged in impermissible hosting activiities” over a four year period. As a result, the football team is not allowed to utilize the program for four years.
In addition to the four-year ban, the program is on probation from Friday to April 23, 2016, fined $5,000 and an additional $3,500 for the seven ineligible player games (at $500 per player). The university will self-impose a limit of 30 official visits per year and caches can participate in one fewer off-campus “evaluation” for the next year. The school will also self impose a 10 day reduction in evaulation days in the fall and spring over the next year.
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Nick Bromberg is the assistant editor of Dr. Saturday on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
