Title Can Be Penalty for UNLV : Enforcement: School also might lose $1 million in TV revenue as a result of latest inquiry.

The University of Nevada Las Vegas could be forced to relinquish the NCAA basketball title it won last spring as well as nearly $1 million in NCAA tournament revenue as a result of violations alleged by the NCAA in the Lloyd Daniels case.

UNLV has been charged with rules violations in 29 areas in a letter of official inquiry from the NCAA that was delivered to the school Tuesday and made public Thursday.

Although the version of the letter released publicly did not include names or identifying characteristics of individuals, most of the alleged violations match those outlined in a 1987 series by Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, describing UNLV’s recruitment of Daniels, a former New York high school star who never played for the Rebels.

The most serious allegation levied against UNLV is the charge that the school did not exercise proper institutional control over the basketball program in three instances, including the recruitment of Daniels.

But there were other charges as well, and because of the possible involvement of an athlete who played in UNLV’s victory over Duke in last season’s NCAA championship game, UNLV could be required to give up its title as well as the nearly $1 million it netted by reaching the Final Four--a penalty that one UNLV official called “the worst-case scenario.”

The NCAA has alleged that two UNLV recruits, before their enrollment at the school, received academic tutoring at no cost to them from a member of the UNLV athletic department academic services staff. That is a violation of NCAA recruiting rules.

The players involved in the tutoring allegation are Daniels and Barry Young, a reserve forward who played for the Rebels during the last two seasons.

In UNLV’s 103-73 victory over Duke in last season’s championship game, Young played 12 minutes and scored five points.

According to NCAA sanctioning guidelines for major rules violations, if the NCAA Committee on Infractions finds that an athlete who was improperly recruited or who received improper benefits competed in an NCAA championship event, the committee can require the athlete’s school to return 90% of its share of the receipts from the event and vacate its position in the event’s final record.

Should it consider the tutoring allegation involving Young both valid and significant, the committee could impose those sanctions on UNLV.

UNLV has 60 days to respond to the letter of inquiry, and the committee is expected to rule on the case sometime in the spring of 1991.

While declining to discuss any allegations contained in the letter specifically, Dennis Finfrock, UNLV’s interim athletic director, said Friday that losing the title and the tournament revenue would be the harshest blow the NCAA could deal the school.

“That would be the worst-case scenario of everything that could come out of this,” he said. “You can talk about two years’ probation or something, but nothing would compare to (losing the title and the money).”

Young, who sat out the 1987-88 season under the NCAA’s Proposition 48 entrance standards and has one year of eligibility remaining, is sitting out the current season as an “academic redshirt,” according to the UNLV sports information department.

Most of the infractions cases in which schools have lost NCAA tournament revenue and been removed from tournament records have involved athletes who received improper benefits after their enrollment.

However, the committee ruled in 1985 that the University of Georgia had to return 90% of the $254,000 its basketball team netted from the ’85 tournament and that the school’s participation in the tournament had to be vacated as a result of recruiting violations involving Cedric Henderson, a center who played in both of the Bulldogs’ tournament games that year.

The committee found that Georgia coaches had provided local automobile transportation for Henderson and his friends on three occasions during his recruitment.

In the UNLV case, the NCAA alleges that an athletic department academic adviser--identified by sources as Shelley Fischer--provided academic counseling and tutoring for Young in the summer of 1987, when Young, who is from Ellicott, Md., was in Las Vegas before his enrollment.

The NCAA alleges that Young received two-hour tutoring sessions from Fischer two or three times a week during a six-week period that summer in the academic counseling area of the Thomas and Mack Center.

The NCAA also alleges that, at the end of the summer, Fischer submitted a letter on Young’s behalf to the UNLV admissions committee describing the tutoring in an effort to help Young be admitted to the university under its alternative criteria admissions program.

In addition, the NCAA alleges that other members of the UNLV athletic department staff knew of the tutoring that was provided for Young and Daniels.

Young and Fischer are two of four individuals named by the NCAA in the letter as having allegedly provided NCAA investigators with false and misleading information.

The Times reported in July that Fischer had been reassigned--to a position in UNLV’s alumni office--for undisclosed reasons relating to the NCAA’s inquiry.