In December 1990 the NCAA received an anonymous letter charging that UT’s summer camp program violated NCAA rules. Following an on-site review of compliance with NCAA rules, the football program was charged with five major violations of NCAA regulations governing recruiting and operation of its football camp program. Assistant Coach Jack Sells was accused of buying an airline ticket for a recruit and transporting him from the airport to campus; making off-campus recruiting visits to Chicago to meet with two recruits who were still juniors in high school and making contact with another recruit during his junior year in high school; and making reservations for a recruit and his family at a local hotel and driving them from the hotel to campus. Sells was also charged with lying to an NCAA investigator during the initial probe in December 1990.
In addition to the recruiting violations, the NCAA alleged that between 1986 and 1990 UT operated illegal “invitation only” summer football camps. Sells was suspended in December 1990, reinstated in March 1991, and fired June 7, 1991. UT’s response was that Sells acted alone and that the university was unaware of his activities, all of which, other than off-season recruiting contact, the university agreed were violations. UT also indicated that its probe did not find any violations related to football camps, and only 11 percent of the attendees ended up playing at Division I schools. (The percent was subsequently determined to be 27.)
In a sworn deposition on May 4, 1991, Coach Sells admitted violating several NCAA rules but said that he had never been asked to read the rule book nor had he been given any instruction or training related to NCAA recruiting rules. On September 18, 1991, the NCAA placed UT on probation for two years for the recruiting violations but enacted no sanctions against the university. The committee considered the infractions “major” but judged the UT case “unique” because of prompt detection of violations, thorough investigation and reporting of violations to the NCAA, cooperation in the processing of the case, and initiation of strong disciplinary and corrective actions by the university. Self-imposed penalties by UT included termination of Assistant Coach Jack Sells, leaving his position unfilled, reducing grant-in-aid scholarships for football players to 85 in the 1992–93 and 1993–94 academic years, and suspending Senior Camp pending the resolution of the case. (The Senior Camp was found not to be in violation of the NCAA regulations.)