When Bob Pruett was hired as defensive coordinator for the UVA football team in February 2008, Cavalier beat sportswriters told the story of a decorated coaching veteran unretiring to help out his old buddy Al Groh.
“I can remember coming to Charlottesville and sleeping on Al’s floor when he was an assistant,” said Pruett, who was head coach at Marshall University from 1996 to 2004, to The Roanoke Times.
From The Daily Progress to The Washington Post, no outlet mentioned one asterisk on Pruett’s resume—major NCAA violations at Marshall that involved the football program and earned the Thundering Herd four years of probation. But all of the sportswriters are paying attention now, thanks to a CBS Sportsline.com story that has re-raised Pruett’s role in those infractions.
 A lawsuit from a disgruntled former colleague alleges that Bob Pruett, UVA’s defensive coordinator, gave him up as a “sacrificial lamb” to the NCAA. |
Most of the violations stemmed from what are called “academic nonqualifiers” in the quaint parlance of college sports. In short, these kids are damn fine athletes who don’t have the grades or test scores to get college scholarships. Now the practice of using “academic nonqualifiers” is highly regulated and limited, but during the ’90s, colleges could still let them play as long as they didn’t give them scholarship money.
That’s where willing football boosters came in. With the Marshall scheme, which started before Pruett became head coach, an assistant football coach arranged for high-paying jobs for some of these “academic nonqualifiers” with a local Marshall athletics booster. According to the NCAA, the booster paid $25 per hour in cash with no W-2s for those jobs, described by the booster as “general flunky cleaning type work.” It was a good way to entice and keep such valuable athletes.
In 2001, the NCAA determined that at least 21 football playing academic nonqualifiers benefited from these jobs during Pruett’s time. Along with numerous other members of the athletics department, Pruett had to attend some seminars and had a letter of reprimand placed in his file.
All of this would have gone away but for a lawsuit from David Ridpath, the former athletic compliance director at Marshall who got much of the blame for not policing this sort of thing. Ridpath’s lawsuit against Marshall, Pruett and several others was filed in 2003, but after more than 250 court filings in U.S. District Court, a judge has set a December 2 trial date.
The plaintiff doesn’t cut an entirely sympathetic figure. According to his own complaint, Ridpath cut a deal with Marshall’s administration: He would be transferred outside of the athletic department but would get a raise and, most importantly, he wouldn’t be linked to the NCAA violations. But Marshall reneged—it labeled his transfer as a “corrective action” to get leniency from the NCAA—and for the past five years, Ridpath has been trying to restore his reputation.
Ridpath alleges that Pruett masterminded an attempted cover up of the violations after the NCAA got wind of them, never telling Ridpath of the employment. “Had Defendant Pruett been forthcoming to the NCAA about his own role in and responsibility for the NCAA infractions at Marshall University—his own reputation and career would be in ruins—not Plantiff’s,” said Ridpath’s attorneys in recent court filings. “Instead, Defendant Pruett exerted his considerable influence at Marshall to offer Ridpath as a sacrificial lamb to the NCAA.”
In terms of what this means for UVA, so far, it is just an “annoyance.”
“We’ve been aware of these circumstances for quite some time, both before he came and subsequent to,” said Groh last week, according to ESPN.com’s Heather Dinich. “We’re comfortable with the situation as we know it to be. It’s an annoyance to [Pruett], but not a distraction.”
Pruett hasn’t commented specifically on the case, as it’s a pending lawsuit. “Those are accusations,” he told reporters last week. “That’s the reason hopefully one day you’ll get your day in court, and we’ll see what happens.”
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