The court-ordered release of the NCAA’s Notice of Allegations against the University of Arizona didn’t reveal many new claims against the Wildcats’ men’s basketball program.
The NOA alleges that former assistant coach Mark Phelps tried to cover up a $500 loan to a player in June 2017, before the UA suspended Phelps and then-forward Keanu Pinder for NCAA rules violations. (The NCAA charged Phelps with only a lesser Level II charge for the loan itself.)
The other four charges were largely expected: One for previously reported incidences of alleged academic misconduct by Phelps and former UA assistant coach Book Richardson; one for Richardson’s previously admitted taking of $20,000 in bribes; one for head coach Sean Miller’s failure to monitor; and one for UA’s overall lack of control. Richardson said in a federal recording that he paid $40,000 for a falsified transcript for former UA guard Rawle Alkins, according to previous reports by Yahoo and ESPN. And Stadium reported in 2019 that Phelps was accused of being involved with fraudulent online course for former Arizona recruit Shareef O’Neal.
But tucked in a list of institutional aggravating factors was also this new allegation from the NCAA enforcement staff: That UA president Robert C. Robbins and athletic Dave Heeke “compromised the integrity of the investigation.”
The Notice of Allegations said that on or about Oct. 1, 2017 — a week after Richardson was arrested and the FBI made public its investigation into college basketball — Heeke and his head of compliance discussed and drafted “talking points related to the external and NCAA investigations that demonstrated from the outset a lack of commitment to cooperation and acceptance of responsibility.”
And on May 20, 2019, the NCAA said, UA’s outside counsel and head of compliance — at Robbins’ direction — conducted an unrecorded interview with Richardson without first notifying the NCAA enforcement staff “despite being engaged in a collaborative investigation and knowing Richardson was a key individual the enforcement staff wanted to interview.” Efforts to reach Robbins and Heeke were unsuccessful on Saturday.
Those allegations were among the 10 “aggravating factors” that could push UA’s case into the Level I-aggravated category. The Wildcats would then be facing a postseason ban of between two to five years; a Level I-standard case would merit only a ban of one to two years, which is consistent with Arizona’s self-imposed one-year ban this season.
“The NCAA enforcement staff has clearly positioned the case as Level I-aggravated for the university,” said Stu Brown, an Atlanta-based attorney who represents schools with NCAA cases. “The enforcement staff has also promoted the narrative of UA being institutionally uncooperative, or even somewhat deceptive, during the investigation.
“In that regard, the enforcement staff is essentially saying that Coach Miller was more cooperative than the university.”
That could complicate the decision on Miller’s fate, since it is Robbins and Heeke who have to decide whether to extend Miller’s deal, terminate him or ride out a contract that has only one year left.
If Robbins and Heeke are waiting for a final verdict on the school’s case before making that decision, there’s no telling when it will happen. Arizona’s case has been moved to the new Independent Accountability Resolution Process, which is now handling six cases and has not yet finished a single one. Arizona is expected to argue the case deserves classification as Level 1-standard rather than Level 1-aggravated. The school may have a better chance of doing so through the IARP, which includes a panel made up mostly of attorneys and investigators outside of NCAA sports.
Brown said he expects “significant pushback on the enforcement staff’s institutional noncooperation narrative from the university,” and says he takes everything the enforcement staff says “with a grain of salt, and sometimes an entire salt mine.”
Arizona basketball coach Sean Miller is under contract for one more season.
The UA is expected to vigorously defend against the allegation that Robbins arranged the interview with Richardson, while arguing that the school provided valuable and extensive cooperation with the enforcement staff throughout the process.
Still, Brown said if any of the institutional Level I charges hold up — especially the ones involving academic misconduct, Richardson’s bribes and UA’s lack of control — an overall “aggravated” classification would not be a surprise.
Brown said he expected UA’s institutional case, as well as the individual cases of Richardson and Phelps, would be categorized as Level I-aggravated while Miller’s would probably be a Level I-standard.
Falling into the Level I-standard category could be the difference between Miller sitting out a third of a season or maybe all of it. If he’s found guilty of a Level I-standard, he’d have to sit out between nine and 16 games; Level I-aggravated would keep him out half to all of an entire season.
Miller’s case could be classified as Level I-standard because the only aggravating factors for him listed were that he “negligently disregarded” alleged violations by Phelps and Richardson, while the fact that he had no prior violations in 28 years as a coach was cited as a mitigating factor.
Richardson and Phelps, meanwhile, both were listed with aggravating factors that included multiple violations, unethical conduct, premeditated violations, negligent disregard for violations as persons of authority, abusing a position of trust and willful, intentional or blatant disregard to NCAA rules. Richardson’s “conduct to generate pecuniary gain” by taking $20,000 in bribes was also listed as an aggravating factor in his case.
The only mitigating factor for Phelps and Richardson was that neither had been previously found to have committed violations.
“It looks much more likely to be a Level I-standard for Sean Miller because there’s not a lot of aggravating factors listed,” Brown said. “With Phelps and Richardson, one of the aggravating factors listed under each of them is multiple violations so that does go toward a more severe penalty.”
While allegations made in the Notice of Allegations can be argued against during the NCAA’s normal resolution process, they can be added to — or subtracted from — along the IARP track. Once the IARP accepts a case, which it did with Arizona in December, the case is handed over to a “Complex Case Unit” that can reinvestigate everything the enforcement staff already did.
The CCU has two groups within it — one with three investigators and one with three attorneys acting separately as advocates.
After the CCU is finished, the case will move to an IARP Independent Resolution Panel, which will ultimately determine whether UA’s institutional and overall cases are Level I-standard or Level I-aggravated.
Even though the IARP is mostly outside the NCAA, Naima Stevenson Starks, the NCAA’s VP for hearing operations, told the Star in December that it still follows the same NCAA rulebook and “penalty matrix” as the standard hearing process.
“They can’t just say, ‘I’m gonna give you a 20-year show-cause for this or a 15-year postseason ban for that,’ because they’re so confined by the member-adopted penalty structure,” Stevenson Starks said. “They could look at the application of the bylaws, and maybe not necessarily do something exactly the way the Committee on Infractions may have handled it in another case, but they’re still confined to that bylaw.”
When the IARP will finish UA’s case may be a bigger question than how.
A final resolution might even be a race with the expiration date on Miller’s contract.
