NCAA denies Sampson appeal

INDIANAPOLIS – The NCAA on Tuesday rejected an appeal from former Indiana basketball coach Kelvin Sampson, who was slapped with five years of potential penalties for taking part in more than 100 impermissible calls to recruits while coaching the Hoosiers.

The NCAA said its infractions committee upheld the violations found in the case, which prompted an overhaul at the storied program and led to Sampson’s departure after just 1 1/2 years.

Sampson is essentially barred from coaching in college until 2013. In his appeal, he claimed the penalty was too harsh, the NCAA misinterpreted evidence and that the infractions committee was biased against him. The NCAA rejected each claim, saying “it found no basis on which to conclude that the findings of violations were contrary to the evidence.”

Telephone and e-mail messages sent to Sampson’s publicist, Chris Capo, were not immediately returned. Sampson is currently an assistant with the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks.

The fallout from the case created a major overhaul at Indiana. Sampson’s assistants all left the school, the compliance department was restructured, athletic director Rick Greenspan resigned and new coach Tom Crean has had to rebuild while accepting the school’s self-imposed recruiting penalties.

Sampson left Oklahoma for Indiana in 2006. The allegations against him were first made public in fall 2007, and Sampson resigned as coach last year, accepting a $750,000 buyout after an NCAA report charged him with five major rules violations.

He later acknowledged that he and his staff had made mistakes, though not deliberately.

“I think they were wrong,” he said of the NCAA in January. “They were wrong in every way. If I didn’t think they were wrong, I wouldn’t have appealed.”

The NCAA ruled that Sampson ignored signed compliance agreements with Indiana, ignored the recruiting restrictions he was already under from a similar case at Oklahoma and deliberately lied to infractions committee members.