30 biggest college football scandals of all time
By Ethan Lee
Albert Means, Alabama, and the possibility of the NCAA’s death penalty
At the beginning of the century, Alabama was nearly nuked by the NCAA’s death penalty. The same penalty that crushed SMU football for over three decades almost landed in Alabama. And it’s because of a scandal that a young Albert Means got caught in the midst of.
In the early 2000s, Alabama was far from being the dominant force that it is today. There was no Saban dynasty established. Alabama was just another team looking to compete each and every week.
Means, a defensive lineman from Memphis, Tennessee, was looking to play college football. According to the NCAA, an Alabama booster agreed to give Means’ head coach $115,000 to make sure that Means signed with the Crimson Tide.
Around the same time as Means’ recruitment, plenty of other issues were going on with Alabama and the NCAA, but this one was fairly egregious and contributed in a major way to Bama getting busted.
Alabama was eventually banned from bowl games for two years, was hit with a scholarship reduction, and was slapped with probation for five years. That’s pretty rough, but things could have been considerably worse.