30 biggest college basketball scandals of all time

7. Southwestern Louisiana gets the death penalty

The NCAA has its so-called death penalty, which involves forcing a school to skip a season of a sport, for serious rules violations. Throughout this list, we’ve seen programs commit academic fraud and get into trouble for paying their own players, but it takes a special kind of program to try and commit both at once.

That special school was Southwestern Louisiana, which appeared to be coming onto the scene as a basketball powerhouse in the early 1970s. The Ragin’ Cajuns became the first school to ever reach the NCAA Tournament in their first year of eligibility in 1972 when they reached the Sweet 16 and duplicated that feat in 1973.

Behind the scenes, however, Southwestern Louisiana was doing a lot of fishy things to promote winning at all costs. The NCAA launched an investigation into the school, and what they found was a blatant disregard for the rules at a truly alarming rate.

Southwestern Louisiana was hit with more than 125 NCAA rules violations in the summer of 1973. These infractions were mainly financial, with players getting paid and using school credit cards to purchase gas and clothes, but the worst problems involved academic fraud.

The program was letting multiple players with GPAs below the minimum of 1.6 compete, covering up their grades by altering records to allow them to remain eligible, and one assistant coach even altered a recruit’s high school transcript complete with a forged signature from the principle. The NCAA came down hard on the school, now known as Louisiana-Lafayette, wiping out the 1972 and 1973 seasons from the record books and shutting down the basketball program for two years.