Death penalty (NCAA)

The death penalty is the popular term for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)'s power to ban a school from competing in a sport for at least one year. This colloquial term compares it with capital punishment since it is the harshest penalty that an NCAA member school can receive, but in fact its effect is only temporary.

It has been implemented only five times:

  1. The University of Kentucky basketball program for the 1952–53 season.[1]
  2. The basketball program at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and athletically branded as "Louisiana") for the 1973–74 and 1974–75 seasons.
  3. The Southern Methodist University football program for the 1987 season.
  4. The Division II men's soccer program at Morehouse College for the 2004 and 2005 seasons.
  5. The Division III men's tennis program at MacMurray College for the 2005–06 and 2006–07 seasons.

Besides those that received this so-called "death penalty" from the NCAA, some schools voluntarily dropped sports programs for extended periods of time due to high-profile scandals. The most notable examples were in 1951, when Long Island University (LIU) shut down all of its athletic programs for six years following the involvement of its men's basketball team in a point shaving scandal, and in the 1980s, when two other Division I men's basketball programs shut down after revelations of major NCAA violations – the University of San Francisco from 1982 to 1985 and Tulane University from 1985 to 1989. The next self-imposed "death penalty" by a Division I school took place in 2015, when Western Kentucky University (WKU) shut down its men's and women's swimming and diving teams due to hazing.

  1. ^ ESPN (2009). College Basketball Encyclopedia: The Complete History of the Men's Game. New York: Random House Publishing Group. p. 236. ISBN 978-0-345-51392-2.