As toothless as they may seem sometimes, you never want to give the NCAA a reason to come snooping around your campus. Kansas Athletics didn’t heed that line of thinking and now, according to CBSSports.com, the college athletics governing body is looking into both the football and men’s basketball programs.
This info apparently comes from someone “working with the attorney for former Jayhawks football coach David Beaty,” who told CBS Sports that he was interviewed by the NCAA on February 27 and that it was part of an investigation regarding a former assistant coach. CBS Sports added that an NCAA enforcement official was spotted on Kansas’ campus recently.
All signs point to this being about the Silvio De Sousa reinstatement case. The basketball forward from Angola was a key figure in the big FBI investigation into college basketball corruption last year. T.J. Gassnola, a former AAU coach and Adidas consultant, testified that he arranged for payments to be made to De Sousa’s guardian in the U.S. in exchange for his commitment to the Jayhawks, who happens to be Adidas’ top school. Kansas pulled De Sousa off the court before the season even started and he still hasn’t played. Even so, the school started wondering aloud if and when an official investigation would start.
Kansas moved to self-declare the sophomore ineligible in January in an attempt to speed up the NCAA ruling on him as KU coach Bill Self was said to be increasingly frustrated with the holdup. An attorney for De Sousa also released a statement calling on the NCAA to immediately reinstate him. The NCAA’s response? They declared him ineligible for the remainder of the season, pissing Self off and setting up a showdown between them and the school.
Self was not interviewed by the NCAA official on campus, per CBS Sports, though they say that, according to experts, that’s normal considering the NCAA may be conducting an inquiry into infractions.
So you’ve got an investigation stemming from the FBI case and Kansas’ possible involvement. Where does Beaty play into this?
The former football coach, who coaches the Jayhawks between 2015 and 2018 to an abysmal 6–42 record, is suing the school over their alleged withholding of $3 million owed to him. Kansas then released a statement saying that, as part of the firing process, they learned that one of Beaty’s assistants may have violated an NCAA rule that nullified the outstanding money owed. Beaty claims the school’s launching of an NCAA inquiry was done specifically to avoid paying him.
And so, if you find yourself on the Kansas University campus in the foreseeable future, don’t be too surprised to see some NCAA officials hanging out nearby. They’ve certainly got a lot of ground to cover. And while it’s likely whatever they eventually do about it won’t amount to much, the stain on the Jayhawks’ reputation might stick around a bit longer.
