Kiffin says team knew of assistant coach’s NCAA rules infraction
BOCA RATON — Florida Atlantic coach Lane Kiffin said Wednesday that he knew about defensive line coach Lance Thompson’s NCAA infraction before the school hired him in January.
Thompson committed an NCAA violation when he had impermissible off-campus contact with a recruit in May 2018 while he was South Carolina’s defensive line coach.
“We’ve known about that for a while so it’s got nothing to do with what was done here obviously,” Kiffin said. “There was an infraction, so they gave the school and him a penalty that carried with him wherever he went.”
The NCAA announced on Tuesday that South Carolina’s football program will be on probation for one season after the two sides reached an agreement.
The Gamecocks also received a $10,000 fine and can no longer recruit the player that Thompson was in contact with — who ESPN identified as defensive lineman Demonte Capehart of IMG Academy.
Thompson, who also serves as the Owls’ recruiting coordinator, has been disciplined with a oneyear show-cause penalty, which requires him to serve a onegame suspension during the 2019 season.
A source with knowledge of the situation told the Sun Sentinel that Thompson sat out FAU’s game against Wagner on Sept. 21 as part of the NCAA’s investigation.
Kiffin said Thompson’s violation won’t affect his status as the the program’s recruiting coordinator. Thompson can’t engage in off-campus recruiting during the fall 2019 evaluation period.
“I didn’t know what the penalty would be,” Kiffin said. “That was a question they don’t tell you because he’s not employed with you so you don’t know and, I believe, the school isn’t allowed to tell you when you ask them what the penalty is going to be. I’m not saying we wouldn’t have hired him, but we thought it was going to be a lesser penalty for what the violation was.”
The NCAA found that Thompson had sent 13 text messages to Capehart from January 2018 to June 2018, while Capehart was a sophomore in high school.
“The explanation I got was he didn’t understand the age classification of the kid,” Kiffin said. “He wasn’t aware or something like that.”
Kiffin also said he regretted the tweet that cost him $5,000.
Conference USA fined Kiffin on Sunday for his Saturday blind-referees meme that he tagged the conference’s official Twitter account in.
C-USA stated the tweet violated the league’s sportsmanship policy by publicly criticizing the conference’s officiating.
“I didn’t think it was [a violation], but like we say to our players, ‘If you do something wrong, you pay for it.’ That’s what happened to me financially,” said Kiffin. “If that’s a rule, I regret doing it.
“People I’ve talked to at FAU thought it was funny. I’m probably not allowed to say this, but the person I talked to — I won’t say who so I don’t get in trouble for saying it — but if I happened to talk to someone at the conference, they actually in the first sentence may have said, ‘It was actually funny, but … ’”