Some Penalty Expected : Tarkanian Suspension Unlikely, NCAA Says

The executive director of the NCAA says he has no personal interest in seeing University of Nevada-Las Vegas coach Jerry Tarkanian suspended, but he believes his organization will take some type of action against the UNLV basketball program.

Dick Shultz said that he doesn’t believe the NCAA infractions committee will suspend Tarkanian, but that it will impose some sort of penalty when it meets Feb. 3 in San Diego.

“They (the infractions committee) won’t want to set some type of precedent where you can try us for 10 years, lose and then get off Scot-free,” Shultz said in an interview Thursday on ESPN.

Shultz’s comments were his first since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that the NCAA has the right to order member institutions to follow its directives even if an individual’s constitutional rights are violated.

The ruling ended a 12-year-old case that began when the NCAA tried to suspend Tarkanian for two years in the late 1970s for alleged recruiting violations. Tarkanian won an injunction blocking the order and the case eventually reached the Supreme Court.

Shultz said he talked with UNLV President Robert Maxson earlier this week and asked Maxson to offer suggestions to the committee on how the matter should be handled.

‘Something Reasonable’

“It should be something reasonable to (UNLV) and something that may be acceptable to the infractions committee,” he said.

Maxson said he agreed with Shultz that there are many options in the case, but he did not discuss them individually.

“I did, however, make an appeal to him that I would hope since the principle that the NCAA had wanted upheld was, in fact, upheld, that they not pursue it,” he said .