Former Tennessee basketball coach Donnie Tyndall has filed a 113-page appeal to the NCAA Committee on Infractions asking for it to vacate the brutal 10-year show cause penalty that was levied against him this spring, according to CBS Sports.
Tyndall took to Twitter to confirm the report and to vow to “keep fighting” the findings the NCAA released in April of this year and the subsequent penalty.
https://twitter.com/DonnieTyndall/status/748247342915141632
“I’m not disputing that violations happened on my watch,” Tyndall told CBS. “I acknowledge that. I take responsibility for that. I should be punished similarly to the way [Syracuse coach] Jim Boeheim and [SMU coach] Larry Brown were punished when violations happened on their watches. But what the NCAA did to me is wrong.
“The NCAA interviewed 40 people, and most of them denied I had any knowledge of academic fraud, and none of them, except Adam Howard, said I was involved. And Adam Howard only said what he said after he cut a deal with the NCAA thanks to his lawyer who used to be on the Committee on Infractions.
“In other words, lots of people said I wasn’t involved — and only one person said I was involved. But the NCAA took the word of one person over everybody else and buried me. That’s not right or fair — especially when you consider that these false allegations also cost me my job at Tennessee.”
Tyndall coached one season at the University of Tennessee in 2014-15 before the Vols fired him with cause in March of 2015 saying at that time that “it is highly likely to be found responsible for serious violations of NCAA rules that occurred during his tenure as head men’s basketball coach at another institution (Southern Mississippi 2012-14).
