BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - The NCAA says Southern University has a “significant amount of work” to do before its athletic programs can become eligible for post-season play, but the university hopes to get that work done in time for its basketball teams to compete in conference and NCAA tournaments.
In email responses to questions from The Advocate newspaper (https://bit.ly/1meVzvg), an NCAA spokeswoman said Thursday that the ban, which became public knowledge last week, was instituted because academic progress data that the school submitted is unusable.
The unusable data were discovered during a routine annual review that the NCAA conducts of 30 to 40 schools.
“The data were incomplete, inaccurate and the school could not produce documentation to verify the information it submitted,” wrote Michelle Brutlag Hosick, the associate director of public and media relations for the NCAA. “A significant amount of work must be completed before NCAA postseason eligibility can be restored.”
The post-season ban will prevent the Jaguars women’s team from participating in the Southwestern Athletic Conference indoor track meet this weekend. The men’s indoor team was already ineligible.
“The data review process is a collaborative one that requires a school to supply quality, accurate documentation that follows the school’s internal policies and procedures,” Hosick wrote. “Often, these requirements are not met initially, and deadlines and requests must be revised to allow the school additional time to fulfill the requests fully and accurately.”
Southern has met nine deadlines to submit the requested documentation to the NCAA and hopes to complete any follow-up requests by Monday.
The Jaguars are hoping to have a favorable ruling in time for their men’s and women’s basketball teams to compete in the Southwestern Athletic Conference and NCAA basketball tournaments next month.
Both Southern teams are in first place in the SWAC but will be ineligible for the conference tournament if they are still banned from the NCAA Tournament because the SWAC tourney champions qualify automatically for the NCAA tourney. The conference tournament is March 11-15 and the NCAA tourney starts the following week.
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Information from: The Advocate, https://theadvocate.com
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