We take violations of NCAA rules very seriously at Cal. In the case of academic fraud, there is no university that takes this issue more seriously. I consider the awarding of unearned academic credit to violate the most basic principle of a university. The case of academic impropriety involving two former student athletes and a professor in the spring semester of 1999, thus, I consider to be an extremely serious violation, and a violation fully deserving of a serious penalty. We self-imposed a penalty that we believed met that standard and the infractions committee of the Pac-10 agreed. The penalty included the loss of four football scholarships over two years and probation for one year.

Later, following the arrival of a new athletic administrative team we discovered the department had failed to require student athletes on the football team who had made unauthorized hotel charges to reimburse the university for those charges. This failure and the failure to manage the related eligibility reinstatement process had unfortunately been allowed to persist over several seasons. We immediately initiated our own investigation of the matter and reported our findings to the NCAA infractions staff with whom we were already cooperating in their investigation of the academic fraud matter. These infractions in and of themselves were relatively minor, in some cases they amounted to an unauthorized phone call of 75 cents, in most other cases charges of a few dollars. It would be difficult to construe these infractions as giving Cal a competitive advantage since if they had been cleared up in a timely fashion and the athletes reinstated properly they would not have risen to a level necessary to report to the NCAA. The problem is that the infractions were allowed to accumulate without being addressed and players who were technically ineligible were allowed to compete.