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Wichita State Placed On Probation

The NCAA announced Thursday that Wichita State has been placed on one year of NCAA probation and its baseball team must forfeit wins from 2012-13 in which 21 ineligible players participated. Those victories will also be wiped from former coach Gene Stephenson’s record. But the Shockers will not serve any postseason ban.

After new coach Todd Butler was hired in the summer of 2013, he discovered that WSU players had received discounts (up to 50 percent) on Under Armour apparel provided by a former administrative assistant. The 21 players spent a total of $7,593.18 on non-baseball apparel such as shoes, clothing and hunting gear.

Wichita State is currently working on calculating the vacated wins total. It will depend on when purchases were made and what wins those players participated in. The maximum number of wins that could be vacated is 74 (35 in 2012 and 39 in 2013).

Since the school self-reported the violations—which were classified as Level II (significant breach of conduct) violations—several player suspensions were cut in half last season, and the penalties announced Thursday were not as severe as they otherwise might have been.

“We fully complied with everything we have been asked to comply with,” athletics director Eric Sexton said in September, per the Wichita Eagle. “We identified mistakes were made. We took action. We held ourselves accountable.”

But it’s worth noting that Stephenson comes out of the investigation looking good. The enforcement panel that conducted the investigation “concluded that the former head coach met his responsibilities because he promoted an atmosphere for rules compliance and did not fail to monitor the former administrative assistant (who made her apparel discount available to players). Over the twenty years that the former head coach supervised the former administrative assistant, he insisted that she comply with NCAA rules at all times . . . All institutional employees interviewed on the subject agreed that the former head coach was serious about his program operating in a manner consistent with NCAA rules.”

The report also concluded that the violations by the former administrative assistant “are unintentional, limited in scope and and represent a deviation from otherwise compliant practices.” Later, the violations were described as “inadvertent and the result of a good-faith mistake.”

Stephenson expressed a desire to return to coaching last year, and there is no reason these NCAA penalties should prevent him from doing so.

STORY UPDATED: Jan. 29, 3:20 p.m. ET.