AUBURN — On Tuesday, Auburn assistant coach Ira Bowman was at practice and expected to travel with the team to the SEC Tournament in Nashville, Tennessee.

On Wednesday, he was not.

The program announced early Wednesday afternoon that the first-year assistant coach has been put on administrative leave. The decision comes two days after Bowman's name came up in court testimony in a trial unrelated to Auburn.

"As we continue to gather information regarding a situation that recently arose, it is important that we be thorough and proactive, yet prudent and cautious," Auburn coach Bruce Pearl said in a statement issued Wednesday. "Therefore, Ira Bowman will not coach or participate in any responsibilities with the men's basketball program until we fully assess all the issues."

Pearl told reporters in Nashville on Wednesday that the decision was made "out of an abundance of caution," and that Auburn is not currently conducting an investigation — "We're in the process of finding more about the situation," Pearl said, according to the Opelika-Auburn News.

The situation that recently arose was the federal Medicare and Medicaid fraud trial of Florida businessman Phillip Esformes. On Friday, former Penn head coach Jerome Allen testified that he took roughly $300,000 as a bribe from Esformes to get his son, Morris Esformes, into Penn using a basketball priority slot, according to a report from Philly.com.

Allen said Bowman, a first-year assistant coach on Pearl's staff who spent the previous six seasons coaching at his alma mater, had knowledge of the scheme and was brought into it after Allen was let go by Penn following the 2015 season.

Evidence of the bribes became public in July of 2018 — around the time that Bowman was hired at Auburn — but Bowman's alleged involvement wasn't known until Allen testified on Friday.

“We were extremely disappointed to learn that Jerome Allen, former head men’s basketball coach at Penn, accepted payments to recruit a potential student-athlete to Penn and concealed that conduct from the Athletic Department and University administration," Penn Athletics said in a statement to Philly.com on Monday.

“Until Jerome’s testimony last week, we also were unaware that former assistant men’s basketball coach Ira Bowman had any relevant knowledge of the matter. The University has been cooperating fully with the government and the NCAA so that the matter is appropriately redressed.”

It's not clear what, if any, NCAA rules Allen or Bowman might have violated. This case seems to be the opposite of the litany of bribery scandals that have flooded college basketball over the past two years, like the one LSU coach Will Wade is currently involves in — whereas those have involved coaches paying athletes or middlemen to steer athletes, this one involves a parent of an athlete paying a coach.

It's also not clear what effect, if any, the situation could have on Auburn, outside of Bowman's place with the program — the events in question took place before he joined Pearl's staff.

But it does make sense for the university to be proactive. This comes just a year-and-a-half after former associate head coach Chuck Person was arrested and charged with six counts of federal corruption on Sept. 26, 2017, as part of the FBI's sweeping investigation into college basketball.

Person was alleged to have paid the mothers of players Austin Wiley and Danjel Purifoy in order to steer them toward a financial adviser who as acting as a confidential informant. As a result, Person was dismissed from the program and Wiley and Purifoy were not eligible to play last season. Person is due in court this summer.

As for this year's Auburn team, it will go to Nashville for this week's SEC Tournament without one of its three assistant coaches in Bowman.

The No. 5-seed Tigers will take on the winner of Wednesday's game between No. 12-seed Missouri and No. 13-seed Georgia at approximately 2:30 p.m. Thursday. The winner of that game will face No. 4-seed South Carolina at the same time Friday.

Josh Vitale is the Auburn beat writer for the Montgomery Advertiser. You can follow him on Twitter at @JoshVitale. To reach him by email, click here.