The Auburn Tigers men’s basketball program has been placed on a four-year probation which includes restrictions on scholarships and recruiting. The school will be fined $5,000 and 3% of the program’s budget. They will lose two scholarships. Coach Bruce Pearl will also serve a two-game suspension for not adequately monitoring former assistant, Chuck Person, and refusing to comply with the interview process during the investigation. This ruling comes four years after Person’s arrest for accepting bribes from a financial advisor to point players in their direction. The financial advisor turned out to be a government informant.
This is not Pearl’s first violation as a head coach. He also lied to investigators during his time at the University of Tennessee and was sentenced to a three year show-cause penalty. His actions will not result in any post-season restrictions this time. The NCAA states the additional reason for the two-game suspension is that Pearl did not carry out his obligation to protect the student-athletes, and “intentionally brought opportunists into the Auburn men’s basketball program.”
“I’m appreciative of Auburn University, our leadership, the AU family and our current and former student-athletes as we navigated through the challenges of the last four years,” Pearl said in a statement. “We respect the NCAA peer evaluation process and appreciate the panel recognized we took meaningful and contemporaneous penalties. It is time to put this behind us. As part of our penalty, I will begin my two-game suspension tomorrow against Nebraska.”
Auburn served a self-imposed post season ban last year, which ended up not mattering because the Tigers ended the season with no hopes of the tournament, at 13-14.
This year, the Tigers are 7-1 and currently ranked 18 in the AP Poll.
