NCAA extends Georgia Tech’s probation to 2017
By Mike Marteny
On Thursday, the NCAA extended Georgia Tech’s probation to June 13, 2017 for “failure to monitor it’s sports programs”, the Associated Press reported on Friday.
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In 2011, the NCAA ruled that Georgia Tech must pay $100,000 in fines and return it’s 2009 ACC Championship trophy as punishment for allowing WR Demaryius Thomas to compete when he was ineligible. The NCAA said that Thomas should have been deemed ineligible for taking gifts from a former player who was working for an agent. The school was also placed on probation for four years.
This two year extended probation is based on an estimated 478 impermissible phone calls and 299 impermissible text messages to 140 different recruits in nine sports, most of them in football and men’s and women’s basketball. This was all just during the 2011 and 2012 seasons.
What the NCAA found particularly disturbing was impermissible phone called made just three days after Georgia Tech appeared before an NCAA committee in April of 2011 for major violations in it’s football and men’s basketball programs.
Athletic director Mike Bobinski said on Friday that “What transpired in 2011-12 and the ‘failure to monitor’ finding are not things that sit well with me or with any of us here at Georgia Tech.” He also stated “This is not a label we intend to wear beyond the point of our extended probation period. We are pleased that the NCAA accepted our self-imposed sanctions and corrective measures, but our clear intentions are that this is the last time we go down this road as an institute.”
Bobinski was hired in 2013 after former athletic director Dan Radakovich resigned to take the job at Clemson.