Lawyer: Tyndall’s case affects all coaches
Appeal of 10-year penalty questions main witness’ veracity, immunity deal
Former Tennessee and Southern Mississippi men’s basketball coach Donnie Tyndall will appear in front of the NCAA Infractions Appeals Committee on Thursday and ask it to overturn the most severe penalty handed out to a coach in NCAA history.
Having lost his $1.6 million-per-year job at Tennessee and his reputation — an NAIA school recently rejected him, he said, after the school president overruled the hiring — Tyndall understands the case, which centered on accusations of academic fraud, has damaged his career to the point where he’ll likely never coach at the highest level again.
“Every day, it’s all you think about,” he said.
But Tyndall’s case also represents a situation that his attorney, Don Jackson, thinks should send a chill down the spine of every coach in college sports.
April 8, the NCAA Committee on Infractions gave Tyndall a 10year show-cause penalty, adding that he would be automatically suspended for the duration of the show-cause period should a school hire him before it ended. The NCAA also gave him a halfyear suspension for the first season he came back from the showcause, making it the harshest penalty ever put on a head coach.
Although Tyndall does not deny that violations occurred under his watch while he was coaching at Southern Miss, Jackson says the NCAA’s case that Tyndall orchestrated the wrongdoing hinged on one witness, former Tyndall assistant Adam Howard, who cut an immunity deal with the enforcement staff after he had lied about his own conduct in two previous interviews.
Moreover, Jackson says that 40 other people the NCAA interviewed, including players and former Tyndall staff members, cleared Tyndall of any knowledge or involvement in the wrongdoing and that the NCAA violated its own bylaws and precedents in granting Howard immunity.
The net effect, Jackson says, is that it will create an environment where assistants are unafraid of breaking rules because, if they are caught, the NCAA has established a precedent of overlooking their conduct via immunity deals in order to go big-game hunting for head coaches.
By virtue of the immunity deal, Howard received no penalty; he is now a full-time assistant coach at Troy University. Troy did not respond to a request to make Howard available to comment.
“If I’m an assistant coach, I’m going to do whatever the (expletive) I want to do and then cut a deal and point the finger at somebody like (Tyndall),” Jackson told USA TODAY Sports during a twohour interview in his office. “If this case isn’t reversed, every college coach in America in every Division I sport needs to be concerned, because they could easily be on the receiving end of it.
“Everything about this case relied on the testimony of one person. (The NCAA) hit a wall, and they had to find some way to get through, even if it meant at the 11th hour taking the word of and propping up a damn liar.”
Jackson, who did not represent Tyndall during the Committee on Infractions hearing, said a request to interview Howard as part of the appeal was denied. NCAA spokeswoman Emily James said the organization could not comment on an ongoing case.
HISTORY OF SANCTIONS By reputation and history, Tyndall hardly projects as a sympathetic figure.
In August 2010, seven months before he coached Morehead State to an upset of Louisville in the NCAA tournament, his program was slapped with probation and other minor sanctions after the NCAA ruled that an alumnus who lived in New Jersey had violated a bevy of rules. They included illegal contact with recruits, facilitating campus visits and offering to pay the first-year tuition of an academic non-qualifier.
The NCAA said Tyndall knew about the booster’s activities and charged him with a failure to promote an atmosphere of compli- ance, but it did not prevent him in 2012 from moving on to Southern Miss, where he and his staff swam in the often-murky recruiting waters of junior colleges and academic partial qualifiers.
Tyndall had enough success at Southern Miss to get the Tennessee job after the 2013-14 season. But by August, the NCAA had begun to investigate allegations that some prospects recruited to Southern Miss were becoming eligible through coursework done by graduate assistants. The investigation became public in early November, shortly before the fall signing period for recruits.
Howard resigned from Tennessee Nov. 25, 2014. Tennessee fired Tyndall on March 27, 2015, the morning after Howard had a proffer call with the NCAA in which the terms of his immunity deal were read into the record and approved by Eleanor Myers, the vice chairwoman of the Committee on Infractions (Stu Brown, Tyndall’s attorney at the time, signed a sworn affidavit that he was never notified about the proffer call).
Tyndall said he thought he’d still be coaching at Tennessee if the school had waited for the process to play out and he should have been given a “coach control” penalty and a nine-game suspension, in line with what the NCAA gave Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim and SMU’s Larry Brown in 2015 for NCAA violations on their watch.
“I didn’t have a school in there behind me,” Tyndall said. “If Tennessee had backed me, I truly believe I would have got nine games. When you go in there without a school backing you up, they just tee off on you. They want to appease the universities.”
OBSTRUCTION ATTEMPT The public report issued by the Committee on Infractions, however, is damning. Not only did it use Howard’s testimony to hammer Tyndall, but NCAA investigators also used computer data to prove widespread academic fraud and build a narrative that Tyndall had attempted to obstruct the investigation by deleting emails from a Morehead State account he still used years later and by using a third cellphone in his mother’s name to contact people around the investigation that he didn’t disclose until his third interview with the NCAA.
Jackson shared a document with USA TODAY Sports showing Tyndall passed a polygraph test Dec. 10, 2015, conducted by Kendall Investigations in Knoxville, Tenn., regarding his explanations for the third cellphone and deleted emails.
Jackson also says the public Committee on Infractions report excludes key details that point to Tyndall having no knowledge of the academic fraud, including work being done for one Southern Miss recruit for two months after Tyndall already had taken the Tennessee job.
Jackson says the graduate assistants who carried out the fraud also were connected to an ongoing NCAA infractions case at Northern Colorado, where, he says, the coursework of a recruit was a carbon copy of work done by a Southern Miss recruit several years earlier.
When Jackson requested information from the Northern Colorado case to include in Tyndall’s appeal, NCAA investigator Tom Hosty — who was demoted from a management position in 2013 after misconduct was discovered in the University of Miami booster investigation — emailed Jackson a letter expressing concern about “how information regarding another institution that might be involved in an infractions matter came to your attention.”
In a follow-up email in May, Hosty wrote that the enforcement staff was concerned “that someone may have violated NCAA bylaws or other professional responsibilities by disclosing confidential information.”
Regardless of Tyndall’s innocence claims, his appeal stands as an interesting test case for just how much evidence is required to essentially end someone’s coaching career in a new era of NCAA enforcement in which the paradigm has shifted somewhat from severely punishing schools to holding coaches accountable.
“You hear about a high standard of proof. … It’s a problem when you enter into agreements with a habitual liar and discount the statements of several dozen people and base the foundation of the whole case on one person,” Jackson said. “This is heading into a really scary direction.
“If you’re innocent, you damn near have to say, ‘I’m guilty,’ to avoid getting a 10-year show cause in the future with the application of those rules in that way. Forget about NCAA legislation, that violates federal law because it impacts mobility and future employment for coaches.
“If you’re going to take a coach’s career away, you have to be sure. Not just smoke. You have to have a damn fire.”