NCAA puts Arkansas on probation for three years

Posted 12:15PM on Thursday 17th April 2003 ( 22 years ago )

LITTLE ROCK - The NCAA placed Arkansas' athletic program on three years' probation Thursday after finding that a university booster overpaid Razorback athletes who worked at his Dallas trucking company. While Arkansas had self-imposed penalties that included the loss of eight football scholarships over four years, the NCAA took away two more scholarships for one more year. The NCAA also made Arkansas give up six of its 56 permitted paid recruiting visits in the next school year. It accepted the university's decision to take away one scholarship in men's basketball in the upcoming year and imposed no new sanctions on the sport. The NCAA said Arkansas took appropriate steps to avoid future problems and self-imposed meaningful penalties, but ``given the serious and repeat nature of these violations and the involvement of a prominent athletic representative, the committee concluded that additional penalties were warranted.'' The sanctions make no mention of Arkansas losing any rights to television appearances or to compete for championships. There was no immediate reaction from the university. The sports information department said coaches and administrators were monitoring a conference call that NCAA officials had with reporters. The school called an afternoon news conference to discuss the sanctions. The main violation regarded overpayments to student-athletes hired by Ted Harrod's Truck Service Inc. Harrod's company allegedly overpaid 20 Arkansas student-athletes by an average of $215 each during the mid-1990s. The NCAA Infractions Committee also said Arkansas committed a major violation when athletic trainer Dean Weber received $21,100 from boosters after being disciplined by the university in a campus drug case. Weber had a criminal misdemeanor violation for failing to document the storage and distribution of prescription drugs to student-athletes in the 1990s. Harrod paid $19,100 to Weber after the school reduced his salary, the NCAA said. Two of the 20 athletes involved in the overpayments were hired by Harrod before they enrolled at the Fayetteville campus, in violation of NCAA rules. The NCAA findings said the case involved major violations by Arkansas for the third time - after football in 1964 and basketball in 1997. It said that a repeat-violator penalty was not appropriate this time because the 1997 violations were found to be ``technical and inadvertant'' and did not result in probation. The probation, which covers all NCAA sports which Arkansas plays, began Thursday and ends April 16, 2006. Further, if the university has a major violation before April 16, 2008, it could be subject to repeat-violator sanctions, the most severe of which is the death penalty for the sport involved. The NCAA Infractions Committee spent months looking into overpayments by Harrod. In January, the panel met with Arkansas officials for more than seven hours at a hearing in Charlotte, N.C. Before the NCAA announcement, Arkansas football coach Houston Nutt said he was pleased that the case was finally being resolved. It has seemed like the university already was being punished, he said. ``I can't wait because we've been on probation for three years,'' Nutt said during a break at an event Wednesday in Forrest City. The coach said the investigation has hurt recruiting. Arkansas self-reported the infractions in 2000. The university said no player received money for not working, and the NCAA agreed but sent the school an official letter of inquiry.

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