Violations continue to unfold in Baylor b-ball sport scandal
by Mark Horvit and Jennifer Autrey Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT)

   FORT WORTH, Texas _ The scandal surrounding Baylor's basketball program is emerging as one of the most sordid in the history of college sports.
    And that's saying something.
   The details shock even experts and academicians who have spent their careers studying the missteps and misbehavior of coaches, players and boosters.
   "This is a new low," said Peter Golenbock, author of numerous sports books, including one detailing various violations in North Carolina State's basketball program that resulted in the school's being placed on probation in 1989.
   The circumstances at Baylor couldn't be much worse. A dead player. Another player accused in his murder. A coach surreptitiously tape-recorded while plotting to malign the dead player in an attempt to cover his department's wrongdoing.
   But the allegations at the heart of the Baylor case-payments made to players, hiding drug-test results -aren't unique.
   "It is a case that clearly demonstrates what has gone wrong," said William Friday, president emeritus of the University of North Carolina and co-chairman of the Knight Foundation Commission on Inter-collegiate Athletics. "It's time for the American public to look in the mirror to say, 'Look, we love college sports, but this isn't what we're talking about.'"
   A commission report said the NCAA sanctioned, censured or put on probation more than half of the universities playing at the NCAA's top competitive level in the 1980s.
   Nearly a third of professional football players responding to a commission survey taken then said they had accepted illicit payments while in college.
   Controversy has seemingly always dogged collegiate sports. Here are some of the lowest episodes:
   Southern Methodist University and the "death penalty."
   SMU already had been penalized by the NCAA for paying players when new revelations emerged.
   Football players were receiving money from a booster-generated slush fund, and members of the school's Board of Trustees, including then-Gov. Bill Clements, knew about it. The investigation resulted in the only instance of the NCAA's shutting down a program. After a two-year banishment, SMU's football program started back up in 1989 but has never reclaimed the success it once knew.
   Fall of the "Fab Five" at Michigan.
   The men's basketball team was belatedly punished by the NCAA this year after a booster-who died before sanctions were announced-said he had paid five top recruits, including current NBA star Chris Webber, in the early 1990s.
   "This is one of the most egregious violations of NCAA laws in the history of the organization," an association official said when sanctions were announced.
   Academic fraud at Minnesota.
   Under coach Clem Haskins, the school's basketball program was found to have had a widespread practice of using tutors to write papers for athletes. Minnesota was placed on probation in 1999 and Haskins was forced out.
   The death of Len Bias, one of the best players in Maryland history, who died of a cocaine overdose in his dormitory, celebrating after being drafted by the NBA's Boston Celtics in 1986.
   His death led to an investigation that uncovered academic shortcomings in the athletic department. A few years later, the university was sanctioned for violations involving special benefits to athletes.
   The point-shaving scandals of the 1940s and '50s.
   Many of the top teams and players in college basketball were implicated in a plot to accept bribes from gamblers to fix games.
   Point shaving has continued: In 1985, four Tulane starters were accused of shaving points. No players were convicted, but the program was shut down until 1989.
   In 1997, two players at Arizona State pleaded guilty to point shaving.
   Golenbock said college sports' scandals inevitably have been driven by one overriding thing-cash.
   "What college basketball is all about is money," he said. "All those Michigan kids were doing was following the money."
   What sets the Baylor scandal apart is not only the murder, but the allegations that coach Dave Bliss attempted an elaborate cover-up by pointing a finger at his own player, said Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College who wrote Unpaid Professionals: Commercialization and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports.
   "Maybe there is nothing quite as egregious as that," Zimbalist said.