NCAA Puts Missouri Basketball on Probation

Missouri’s basketball team was put on two years’ probation today, banned from the NCAA Tournament in March and hit with severe restrictions on recruiting and scholarships.

About an hour later, the school announced that assistant coaches Bob Sundvold and Rich Daly had both resigned, effective at the end of this season.

Haskell Monroe Jr., Missouri chancellor, said at a news conference the coaches resigned voluntarily and that they would coach the current season because “there have been enough disruptions in the program.”

The NCAA said Missouri was guilty of major violations between 1985 and 1989 concerning recruiting, benefits for athletes and academic irregularities.

In addition to the postseason ban for the 1990-91 season, Missouri cannot provide expense-paid recruiting visits during 1991; only one member of the coaching staff can engage in off-campus recruiting and evaluation for 1991; and the school can give only one basketball scholarship during the 1991-92 academic year and no more than two in 1992-93.

Wednesday, the NCAA placed the Illinois basketball program on probation for three years, including an NCAA Tournament ban next March. Also, the school is banned from off-campus basketball recruiting and from paying for visits by recruits to its campus the first year. The school also will be limited to awarding just two basketball scholarships in each of the first two seasons of the probation.

Chuck Smrt, NCAA director of enforcement, said the penalties against Missouri were lighter because the school had no history of NCAA violations and accepted responsibility for violations that were uncovered. Illinois was hit with NCAA sanctions five previous times since 1967.

The probe began nearly two years ago into the basketball program of Norm Stewart, who has a 552-273 collegiate record in 29 years and a 455-231 record in 23 seasons at Missouri. He is the winningest Big Eight Conference basketball coach, with 197 victories.

The NCAA announcement said Stewart “delegated many of his responsibilities to his assistants, and neither the assistants nor the head coach maintained records, checks and balances or identifiable processes for institutional control, which could have been used to reconstruct their actions.”

Sundvold and Daly were not named in the NCAA release.

The investigation began in February, 1989 after a tape-recorded conversation became public between Sundvold and the mother of former Missouri player P.J. Mays.

The next day, Stewart collapsed on the team plane en route to Oklahoma for a Big Eight Conference game. He missed the rest of the season while undergoing treatment for ulcers and colon cancer and Daly took over the team, directing it to victories in the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament.