Louisville basketball: What OSU punishment means for Cards

Things get gloomier for Louisville basketball.

With Louisville basketball amid proceedings with the NCAA after being handed down its Notice of Allegations in May, we have been paying close attention to the punishments being dolled out to other organizations involved in similar pay-for-play scandals.

Louisville basketball has become the media’s poster child for corruption despite the university’s attempts to rid itself of rogue actors and violators that have brought a nauseating amount of negative coverage to the program.

Other programs like NC State, Kansas, and South Carolina have received NOAs, while perhaps the most egregious violators, LSU and Arizona, are still waiting for their notices.

With so many schools waiting to see what the NCAA’s findings are, it’s important for Louisville fans to follow these issues closely in order to assess what kind of violations schools caught up in this mess are accused of and, subsequently, what punishments are handed out.

Though it has been a bit of an afterthought among a group of bigger-name programs, Oklahoma State basketball became the first school involved in the pay-for-play scandals to officially receive its punishment from the NCAA on Friday.

If you’re a Louisville fan, the news is not the best.

In a release Friday, the NCAA announced that OSU would receive a one-year postseason ban in 2021, three years of probation, and a $10,000 fine.

What this means for Louisville basketball

So, what exactly does this mean for Louisville, then?

It starts with a comparison of what exactly OSU violations were with that of the Cardinals, and how both universities reacted.

In the case of Oklahoma State, former Cowboys assistant Lamont Evans is accused of accepting upwards of $22,000 to send players to a financial advisor after college. He also did the same for players at South Carolina.

The school acted in turn by firing Evans in 2017.

"“The university is stunned by the severity of the penalties and strongly disagrees with them,” Oklahoma State said in a release. “The penalties do not align with the facts and are unfair and unjust. … The NCAA appears to have made an arbitrary decision in the sanctions applied to the institution for the egregious actions committed by a former coach that did not result in any benefit for the university.”"

The decision by the NCAA is a bit of a confusing one, in that the school did not appear to directly benefit from Evans’ actions. Instead, he was acting for personal gain in order to help agents benefit by being able to represent Evans’ players as future clients.

Logic would lead one to believe that these actions in no way helped the school win or lose games and the fact that the University fired Evans upon finding out about his actions shows that they are trying to take the necessary steps to comply both with the law and NCAA standards.

It would be common sense, if the NCAA is going to punish Oklahoma State, to not have said punishments impact current and future student-athletes, but here we are.

The actions of the NCAA would lead one to believe that a school like Louisville, who was deemed the victim of a pay-for-play bribery scheme as part of an FBI sting that saw former assistants Kenny Johnson and Jordan Fair ensnared in its trap, is next in line to take a big hit.

Also Read: Why Seth Greenberg believes Louisville basketball will not receive a postseason ban

Louisville did all it could to rectify the situation. Weeks after long-time president James Ramsey stepped away, Louisville fired head coach Rick Pitino days before the 2017 season, and AD Tom Jurich shortly after.

There’s not a single person left in Louisville’s athletic department, let alone the basketball program, who was there at the time of the violations. A clean slate.

However, the NCAA has shown the propensity to punish the university as a whole regardless of actions taken to clean house or self-impose its own punishments.

Not helping is the fact that Louisville was amid a probationary period at the time of the violations due to a scandal in which players allegedly were entertained by strippers in exchange for money provided by former Louisville basketball staffer Andre McGee.

The punishment that could come down this time may be harsh, but that is only amplified by the fact that it is a nearly unprecedented second violation during a period of probation.

Louisville basketball cleaned house, and in my personal opinion, and in the opinions of many who cover college basketball for a living, that should be more than enough.

However, the NCAA has an ever-moving goalpost of morality, and Louisville basketball has fallen victim to it once already.

Perhaps the only thing that could save the Cardinals is taking a stab at an alternate route to justice. Louisville has the opportunity to be one of the first schools to utilize the new Independent Accountability Resolution Process (IARP) instituted by the new Condoleezza Rice commission. This could be a chance for Louisville to go outside of the norm and use an independent resolution process designed to handle complex infractions cases.

It’s an outside shot, but at this point, Louisville basketball doesn’t have much more to lose and everything to gain.

There are still a lot of dominoes left to fall, but based on Louisville’s history with the NCAA and the extremely tough ruling on the Oklahoma State case, the outcome is looking a bit bleaker as we near closer to a response from the University of Louisville.