By J.T. Keith
Eastern New Mexico University is still waiting to hear its punishment from the NCAA for playing ineligible student-athletes from 2008-2013.
ENMU has offered self-imposed penalties to the NCAA. Those penalties are vacating all victories from 2008-2012 in eight sports—football, baseball, men’s basketball, men’s soccer, softball, women’s soccer, volleyball, and women’s basketball —as well as vacating 2012-2013 victories in football, baseball, men’s soccer, women’s soccer, and volleyball. ENMU also has proposed to vacate championship team finishes in men’s and women’s cross country from 2008-2012, and men’s and women’s track and field from 2009-2013.
Turn to pages 6-7 for a complete list of vacated wins proposed by ENMU. The NCAA has not accepted the self-imposed penalties, so the wins are not officially vacated yet.
In addition to the vacated wins, ENMU also would “reconfigure the records of the head coaches in the affected sports to reflect the vacated performances, and the vacated records/results shall be included in all publications in which athletic performances are referenced, including but not limited to media guides, recruiting materials, Web sites, institutional and NCAA archives…. ENMU will notify all opponents in writing of competition results that have been vacated. Finally, ENMU will remove any public reference to any team or individual performance that includes a vacated result,” according to the ENMU “Infractions Preliminary Report” sent to the NCAA on July 24, 2013.
“I’m not really going to comment on it right now because the NCAA investigation is still under way,” Lone Star Conference Commissioner Stan Wagnon said. “My understanding is that Eastern New Mexico has submitted partial information to the NCAA, and we’ve seen that. Basically, all the information has to go to them. They have to perform their investigation, and they will provide Eastern New Mexico with their findings, and a notice of allegations. I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to comment until we know for sure what the NCAA has confirmed or has alleged is a violation of the rules. We have to wait and let the process play out.”
ENMU Athletic Director Jeff Geiser was out of town and not available for comment.
The violations were self-reported to the NCAA, and ENMU has asked for some degree of leniency.
In the, “Infractions Preliminary Report” sent to the NCAA, representatives of the ENMU athletic department wrote, “We here at Eastern Mexico University freely admit that the violations contained within this report are serious, and we regret they occurred. However, on behalf of our student-athletes, coaches and staff, we ask that the NCAA be lenient when imposing penalties. We stress the fact that we have self-reported all violations contained within this report. Some violations are so intricate that we doubt that they would have ever been discovered by the best outside compliance review.
“No one turned us in. Once we realized we had problems, we aggressively pursued all indications of improper actions. Many here have already endured hardships as a result of our findings. We have had numerous student-athletes, some going into their final year of eligibility, who worked hard in the offseason to prepare for their senior year and endured hours of practice only to learn that they were ineligible. Eastern New Mexico University has had limited success in athletics. We are not considered an ‘Athletic Powerhouse.’ We compete in a tough conference, going against better financed Texas institutions. Almost all of our program’s operating budgets are in the bottom quadrant when compared to our LSC sister institutions. Only football, volleyball, men’s and women’s basketball are close to their maximum scholarship equivalencies.
“Finally, as an institution we are stronger today than we were five years ago in 2008-2009. Sometimes it takes a crisis to force chance. There are many life lessons learned through participation in athletics. They include dealing with adversity, meeting challenges head on, learning from mistakes and living in the present. We can’t change the past. We can only control the present and prepare for the future. Moving forward we have established an adequate athletic compliance system.”