Donnie Tyndall has requested that the NCAA’s Infractions Appeals Committee overturn the penalties that were levied against him by the Committee on Infractions.
Tyndall’s reasoning, according to CBSSports.com, is that the Committee on Infractions “relied near exclusively on the testimony of Adam Howard” when they hit him with a 10-year show-cause penalty earlier this year. According to Tyndall, more than 40 witnesses were interviewed by the committee and Howard, a former Tyndall assistant coach at Morehead State, Southern Miss and Tennessee, was the only one that said Tyndall was involved. Howard also cut a deal with the NCAA.
Tyndall’s punishment stems from a scandal that emerged from his two seasons at Southern Miss. Among the things that Tyndall was accused of: Having staff members do coursework to help get potential student-athletes eligible, paying out of pocket for kids that did not qualify academically to remain in school and lying to the NCAA while covering his tracks. Here’s how deep the scandal allegedly went: Tyndall hired two staffers specifically to help with the academic fraud, going as far as to send those staffers to the towns that the players lived in to make sure IP addresses added up, while using burner phones and an old Morehead State address he had access to in order to hide communications.
And he lied about all of it to the NCAA, which, as we’ve learned, is the quickest way to get the harshest punishment possible.
Tyndall does have a point in his appeal. If the NCAA’s evidence is all coming from a guilty party that’s singing to lessen his own sentence, that’s not exactly the most reliable witness. But the Committee on Infractions isn’t a court of law, meaning I have a hard time seeing the NCAA overturn anything when the point of Tyndall’s punishment was to make an example out of him.