Ole Miss looking for NCAA resolution on Saunders
Ole Miss is continuing to work towards a resolution with the NCAA regarding a former football staffer and its women’s basketball program, athletics director Ross Bjork said.
The program has been connected to the NCAA’s investigation of Louisiana-Lafayette and its former assistant coach David Saunders because he worked at Ole Miss as recently as 2010. ULL in a response to the NCAA’s allegations suggested that Saunders had committed academic fraud while in Oxford.
“There’s not a lot I can tell you because we are really embargoed by the NCAA processes,” Bjork told the Clarion-Ledger before speaking at the Jackson Touchdown Club. “What I would say is that there’s no new developments that we’re aware of related to that. We’re cooperating and as things move along we believe in our staff, we believe in how we do things and we hope that we can come to an end-game very soon and we’re pushing for that.”
The same goes for the women’s basketball program. Bjork essentially fired former coach Adrian Wiggins and two staffers in 2012 after academic misdealings and illegal recruiting contact were discovered. While Ole Miss penalized itself, the NCAA has never brought closure to the situation.
Ole Miss did get resolution last week on left tackle Laremy Tunsil, who will play his first game on Saturday against No. 15 Texas A&M. Tunsil missed the first seven games of the season after the NCAA found he accepted impermissible benefits, including use of loaner cars and an interest-free loan.
It’s a process that publicly began when the school said it was holding out Tunsil for “precautionary measures” before the Sept. 5 season-opener against UT-Martin. While Bjork said it was the right decision, he was not ready to say whether or not he expected it to take this long to get Tunsil back.
“What’s tough to sort of talk about all the factors that go into these type of situations,” Bjork said. “There are so many factors that aren’t known, so I guess the easiest answer I could give you is that it’s not as clear as what maybe it was portrayed to be. No way to predict. There was no timeline that we said, ‘We have to have this by a certain time, and this decision by a certain time.’ We knew it was step-by-step procedural things to go through and that being one of them -- not playing him was the right decision.
“In the end that helped the reinstatement process by not playing him. No idea it would take this long but there are factors that are outside of your control that are part of these things that complicate.”
Bjork also said construction on the new basketball arena remains on schedule for a Jan. 7, 2016 opening.