The NCAA is so powerful, it can make entire years disappear just by looking at a school funny. Following a collaborative investigation with the NCAA into impermissible benefits given to members of the men's basketball team from 2011 to 2014, Missouri has taken the initiative and wiped out the entire 2013-2014 season. The school has also banned itself from postseason play this year and stripped itself of one scholarship this year, and another no later than 2018. The hope is that the NCAA finds this self mutilation acceptable and imposes no further discipline.But what were the impermissible benefits? Must have been something really bad, right? I mean people who go/went to Mizzou lost an entire year of their lives. Poof, gone. [Obi Wan Jedi hand wave] These are not the games you're looking for. Anyway, surely it was bad. Let's take a look. And feel free to add "seriously" after each sentence.
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- "A former associate head men's basketball coach assisted in the relocation of a prospective student-athlete by providing the phone number of the prospect's mother to a donor to arrange for rental housing." (They paid market rate for the apartment.)
- Improper contact with a recruit, including the purchase of a meal for said recruit.
- A donor provided student athletes with "friends and family rate" at a hotel, and meals and a boat ride. A student manager drove players to the hotel.
- Donors paid student athletes for work done at businesses outside of the existing internship program. "the donor also provided other impermissible inducements and extra benefits including housing, cash in the amount of $520, local transportation, iPads," and other benefits.