Details of ISU violations surface in report

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Alex Halsted

Iowa State made violations that “constitute a major infractions case as a whole,” it revealed in a document released Wednesday.

The document released to the Daily details 1,484 impermissible calls made between 2008-11 during recruiting. The violations, according to the report, took place across all 18 of Iowa State’s varsity sports.

The ISU athletic department placed itself on two-year probation in November 2011, said it has or will invest more than $82,000 during the next three years in compliance and recruiting software and will impose call bans for various teams and coaches.

The investigation began in April 2011 after ISU men’s basketball coach Fred Hoiberg became aware of improper contact with prospective recruits by coach Keith Moore while in attendance at his son’s basketball game. That night Hoiberg notified ISU Athletic Director Jamie Pollard of the potential violation.

In addition to Moore, the report names current assistant football coaches Shane Burnham and Bill Bleil, former football assistant coaches Luke Wells and Bob Elliott and former assistant basketball coach Daniyal Robinson for acknowledging involvement.

The enforcement staff initially examined the information using what it called a “trigger call.” With that standard, explained in the report as “no contemporaneous documentation of the call,” there would have been 33 coaches and 1,405 impermissible calls.

The standard of a trigger call, “in order to mitigate the large number of potential involved individuals,” was changed to a call longer than two minutes, which shortened the list to six coaches.

The report filed with the NCAA in November 2011 shows that 962 impermissible calls were made by the ISU football staff, including staff members from the programs of both Gene Chizik and Paul Rhoads. Elliot, who currently coaches at Notre Dame, made 199 of those calls.

Men’s basketball represents the second largest number of improper calls with 147, and Moore also sent 160 impermissible text messages between August 2010 and August 2011.

The majority of the impermissible calls were for failure to log after no contact was made with a recruit. Out of the 962 impermissible calls made by the football staff, 810 were due to logging issues.

In all, Iowa State said 1,260 impermissible calls were due to logging issues.

The investigation reviewed more than 750,000 calls made during the three-year period from all 69 coaches.

The ISU athletic department concluded that, “The University believes it has conducted a thorough inquiry and has imposed appropriate corrective and punitive actions.” Those actions include the two-year probation and specific call bans listed in the report for individual teams and coaches.

For football, the call bans included: “Five weeks of no telephone calls by all coaching staff members [and reducing] official visits by 20 percent from the four-year average.”

Iowa State has asked the NCAA to consider that the institution responded “rapidly” and “produced very little, if any, recruiting advantage” due to the impermissible calls.