ACC, Big 12 siding with NCAA after Big Ten's demand to pause tampering cases

The NCAA plans to continue its enforcement of tampering, officials tell Yahoo Sports, despite a request from the Big Ten to suspend such investigations.

Executives from the Big 12 and ACC told Yahoo Sports on Thursday that they are opposed to pausing any tampering cases. An SEC official declined comment on the matter for now, but the league’s own commissioner, Greg Sankey, urged the NCAA to pursue tampering violations in an interview with Yahoo Sports just two months ago.

In a letter to the NCAA this week, the Big Ten urged the association to pause cases related to tampering while the NCAA works to reform and modernize policies. Such a move — the suspension of active investigations — requires a vote from the Division I Board of Directors and is not an NCAA staff decision.

An NCAA working group — the infractions modernization task force — is already undergoing a full reform of tampering and other policies. The process should not result in a pause in enforcement, conference leaders say.

Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark says he’s “adamantly opposed” to pausing tampering, but is open to a discussion on rule reform. In a statement to Yahoo Sports, ACC commissioner Jim Phillips says he “does not agree” with suspending tampering investigations during the NCAA’s review of rules and calls enforcement of rules “critically important” in the current environment.

At the direction of the Division I Board of Directors — an executive group made up of school administrators — the NCAA has refocused efforts on pursuing tampering violators over the last two months. The association, in fact, has opened several investigations recently, even distributing a memo to schools announcing the pursuit of “significant penalties” for violators.

Those penalties may include coach game suspensions, scholarship reductions and a vacating of wins for using a player tampered with.

Most notably, the NCAA has opened a tampering inquiry into Ole Miss, which was at the center of an explosive news conference in which Clemson coach Dabo Swinney accused Rebels coach Pete Golding of directly tampering with one of his players. However, Ole Miss officials hold evidence that multiple coaches from other schools tampered with their own players. The allegations may lead to a wave of cases and a flood of penalties as staffs implicate other staffs for tampering — a policy that is regularly violated.

In January, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and other league administrators delivered comments to Yahoo Sports criticizing the NCAA for its lack of tampering enforcement and urging the association to pursue violators.

During meetings in Nashville this week, SEC presidents discussed tampering at length, with many of them against the complete suspension of cases.

Tampering, rampant across the sport, is NCAA Bylaw 13.1.1.4 — the act of one school staff member communicating with a player at another school about transferring before that player enters the NCAA transfer portal.

However, as House settlement negotiations escalated in the fall of 2024, the Division I Board of Directors instructed the NCAA staff to mostly pause enforcement of tampering as focus shifted toward the finalization and then implementation of, arguably, the most significant change in college athletics history — the settlement-related athlete compensation model currently in existence.

In January, the DI Board directed the association to reignite tampering enforcement, perhaps as aggressively as ever before. In a statement to Yahoo Sports in January, the NCAA says its enforcement team has processed about 95 tampering cases thus far this year, some of which remain with the Committee on Infractions for final approval.

That said, tampering is not an easily prosecuted violation. There are plenty of hurdles, the most of which is actually having enough evidence - from the alleging party - to prove that tampering did, in fact, happen. Gathering hard evidence of tampering is difficult as coaches and school administrators often avoid reporting other staffs. 

“Successfully enforcing tampering cases requires cooperation from coaches, student-athletes and administrators – especially from those whose teams were tampered with – and while the Association is thankful for the support for the finished cases, more cooperation will lead to more closed cases,” said Tim Buckley, the NCAA’s senior vice president of external affairs, in a statement released in January.

Swinney’s public tampering allegations against Ole Miss and Golding last month cracked the door to more such allegations privately reaching investigators at NCAA headquarters.

Said one college official: “I think everyone is figuring out that everybody is speeding. When somebody breaks that seal like Dabo, that’s good. It ramps up the pressure on the NCAA.”

A vicious cycle may materialize of rival staffs — the subject of investigations — reporting other staffs and so on.

“How will the NCAA adjudicate it all?” asked one college sports stakeholder involved in one of the inquiries.

Asked about that last month, NCAA president Charlie Baker gestures toward the new infractions modernization task force.

“That kind of example is exactly the sort of thing we charged them with,” he said. “Here’s five to six things that are different and we can’t just do the same thing. We need to come up with a different way to do it.”

The task force — a hodgepodge of school administrators and NCAA personnel — is studying every aspect of tampering, from the penalty structure to the actual bylaws in an effort to modernize rules for the current environment of college sports.

“It’s a different world,” Baker said. “They are taking a big look at the whole thing.”

The NCAA president specifically pointed to third parties — agents — who sometimes have no real relationship with the school and yet are communicating with coaches at schools about players (sometimes without players even knowing), all in an effort to drive up prices.

The NCAA does not have jurisdiction to penalize agents and their role in tampering, but the association can punish the schools.

Is it on the schools to police their players’ own agents?

The NCAA’s bylaws give us a glimpse into tampering punishments. Impermissible contact (the NCAA’s word for tampering) can, in fact, be a Level I infraction — the most serious of them. Penalties include recruiting restrictions, coach suspensions, fines, probation and vacation of wins based on participation of the player who was tampered with.

“As we continue to move forward in the critically important areas of modernizing collegiate athletics, it is imperative that we remain focused on enforcement and building the necessary rules and penalties through work with the NCAA,” said Phillips, the ACC commissioner. “We are in an environment like no other, and we consistently hear from our coaches and administrators that tampering enforcement must be prioritized. The ACC is dedicated to a thorough review of the current contact rules, but in light of the most recent transfer portal and the very public examples of clear tampering and blatant interference with contractual commitments, I do not agree that all tampering investigations should be suspended.”