Dirtiest Football Programs: #5, Kentucky

When it comes to the cheating-to-wins ratio, few teams do as poorly as the Kentucky Wildcats. From the beginning of the 1998 season to the end of the 2001 season (the time during and immediately after the cheating in the report) the Cats were 17-29, and it was during the'98-'99 season that the cheating started, so the real record that their cheating can claim is more like 10-24. Not so impressive.

Despite the impotence of Kentucky's shenanigans, they still amount to some of the most blatant violations of the modern era, and that's just from reading the official NCAA Report and ignoring the evidence that some higher-ups in the Athletic Department threw the recruiting coordinator under the bus to avoid a more revealing inquiry by the NCAA. Kentucky appears here at number five on the strength of one case, the second worst of the modern era, by my score card. (Update: I had originally stated that this was the "single worst" violation, which was incorrect. another violation actually eclipses this one by .25 points)Sorry, No Photos

The NCAA report implicates a number of former members of the Kentucky athletics department, but none so frequently or strongly as they do the former recruiting coordinator Claude Bassett. He started with the gateway drug of NCAA violations: paying for too many things on a recruit's visits. In 1999 Basset began paying for hotel rooms and incidental expenses for recruits to visit Lexington and quickly progressed to paying for head coaches, friends, and family to come along.

Basset had assistants pay for hotel costs and incidentals (including one incident where a couple of recruits ran up a $300 movie bill during their stay) and he himself handed out cash to a recruit "in order for the young man to go shopping at stores adjacent to the hotel where he was staying." Bassett sent one coach $1,400 in cash and numerous others various items of Wildcat apparel (almost all of it from the football equipment stash) as an incentive for the coaches to funnel prospects to UK. He also helped a high school coach get an $850 gig as a no-work consultant at a UK Football camp.

On one occasion, Bassett paid a mini-bar tab of nearly $350 for some high school coaches.

Bassett didn't quit helping the kids out when they got to Lexington, though. He wrote a paper for one athlete, helped two athletes write other papers (by adding material for them), and gave a third student research to help him write a poli-sci paper.

He also forged letters, letterhead, and signatures from various Deans to convince recruits that they could get into the academic programs they were interested in. He was booster savvy, too, in giving two speeches to a Hopkinsville booster club, Bassett "passed the hat" and collected a total of more than $2,000.

Bassett's dirty deeds aren't even the most fascinating part of this story. The head coach at Kentucky for these violations, and the current head coach at New Mexico State, Hal Mumme had a few dings in the NCAA report, including getting some boosters to "supplement" the salary of his personal assistants, but he was (by and large) let off the hook for Bassett's transgressions because he, ostensibly, didn't know they were happening.

Sunday Morning QB gives us this little nugget, which came out of a $50 million suit filed by Bassett against the UK Athletics Association, the NCAA, and the SEC:


So, in other words, they thought they could make it all go away by sweeping it under the rug. It does seems to suggest that Mumme didn't know the things were going on. This seems highly unlikely, and we think the folks over at the Kentucky blog A Sea of Blue would agree. After all, if Stoops and company couldn't have missed two kids getting paid for doing nothing, how could Mumme miss such widespread and overt violations by one of his own employees?

In any event, Mumme was interviewed while he was coaching at SE Louisiana and asked to comment on Bassett. His response? "I love Claude Bassett." I wonder why.

This mess earned Kentucky violations for unethical conduct, failure to monitor, academic fraud, and lack of institutional control, as well as a whole mess of penalties, earning them the #5 spot in our countdown.

Scoreboard:

• Unethical conduct (5 points)
• Academic fraud (5 points)
• Failure to monitor (10 points)
• Lack of institutional control (10 points)
• Probation: 3 years (6 points)
• Post-season ban: 1 year (3 points)
• Initial scholarships: 19 total (9.5 points)
• Scholarship cap reduction: 5 total (1.25 points)
• Total: 49.75 points

It's a good thing that Kentucky didn't circle the wagons and stonewall the NCAA like they did in 1988 when they were nailed for "failure to cooperate" with the investigation that produced the Men's Basketball case of 1989.
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