U.S.C. Receives Two-Year Ban and Loses Title
By LYNN ZINSER
Published: June 10, 2010

The National Collegiate Athletic Association severely penalized the University of Southern California on Thursday, barring its football team from bowl games for two years and ordering it to vacate its 2004 national championship, citing major violations by the football and men’s basketball programs. The harshest penalties stem from improper benefits given to the Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush and the basketball player O. J. Mayo, which the N.C.A.A committee on infractions said struck at the heart of the association’s amateurism principle.

The harshest penalties stem from improper benefits given to the Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush, above, and the basketball player O. J. Mayo.

The N.C.A.A. barred the football program from bowl games for the 2010 and 2011 seasons, forced it to vacate all victories in which Bush participated beginning in December 2004 — including the Orange Bowl victory that produced the Trojans’ Bowl Championship Series title in January 2005 — and docked the Trojans 10 scholarships in each of the next three seasons. The university was cited for lack of institutional control.

The announcement was made in a news conference by the committee chairman, Paul Dee of the University of Miami, and the report was made available on the N.C.A.A. Web site.

These were the stiffest penalties given to any university since the N.C.A.A. issued the “death penalty” to the Southern Methodist football program in 1986, shutting it down for two years.

The committee accepted several of the penalties Southern California had imposed on its men’s basketball team, including vacating its victories from the 2006-7 season and forfeiting one scholarship. U.S.C. had also barred itself from the 2010 postseason. The university will also return the $206,200 it received for participating in the 2008 N.C.A.A. tournament.

The women’s tennis program was also penalized because a player used a university credit card to make $7,000 worth of international phone calls.

The university must also disassociate itself from Bush and Mayo. The football coach Pete Carroll left in January to become head coach of the Seattle Seahawks in the N.F.L. The basketball coach Tim Floyd resigned in June 2009.

Despite the fact that the report cited Floyd for continuing to recruit Mayo after he was advised to stop, Dee said Floyd was not cited individually for any violation. He also said no consideration was given to the fact that Southern California recently hired Lane Kiffin, who was the receivers coach from 2001 to 2006, as the head coach to replace Carroll.

“That’s an independent issue not involving this committee,” Dee said. “That was not a part of it.”

The committee’s report detailed improper benefits received by Bush and his family after partnering with two men to form New Era Sports and Entertainment. New Era provided housing, air travel, an automobile and other benefits to Bush’s mother and stepfather, Denise and LaMar Griffin.

“The general campus environment surrounding the violations troubled the committee,” the infractions report said. “At least at the time of the football violations, there was relatively little effective monitoring of, among others, football locker rooms and sidelines, and there existed a general postgame locker room environment that made compliance efforts difficult.”