30 biggest college basketball scandals of all time

23. Kelvin Sampson costs himself the Indiana job

There are quite a few coaches that seem to have trouble and scandal follow them around like a black cloud, and one of the most prominent examples of this is Kelvin Sampson. Sampson is an excellent basketball coach who wins everywhere he goes, but what happened to him at Indiana was a fine example of pushing the limits of the rules too far.

After taking over at Indiana after a successful run at Oklahoma, Sampson got himself into immediate hot water over the recruitment of guard Eric Gordon. Gordon had verbally committed to the University of Illinois, but Sampson convinced him to abandon that commitment and sign with Indiana, failing to communicate his intentions to Illini coach Bruce Weber in the process.

While the Gordon incident wasn’t a clear rules violation, merely unethical, Sampson had been in hot water dating back to his days at Oklahoma. The Sooners were under investigation for three years as a result of Sampson’s willingness to push the envelope when it comes to recruiting, and the NCAA found that he and his staff had completed more than 550 impermissible recruiting phone calls.

The NCAA banned Sampson from off-campus recruiting and making phone calls for a year, but he still kept calling recruits anyway, participating in conference calls and having assistants call on his behalf. Sampson was hit with five major rules violations and was forced to resign from Indiana after he was caught lying to the school about the infractions.

Indiana was hit hard by the NCAA, receiving three years probation for the violations that occurred while Sampson was on campus. Sampson himself received a five-year “show-cause” penalty, essentially blackballing him from the NCAA until 2014 when he was hired by the University of Houston.