“This thing has tentacles.”

Inside Higher Ed reports.

NCAA finds Southern Mississippi basketball staff committed academic fraud

For two years, the former head men’s basketball coach at the University of Southern Mississippi directed his staff to complete the coursework of prospective athletes while they were still enrolled in junior colleges, the National Collegiate Athletic Association said Friday.

Showing how the pressures of Division I college athletics can breed academic fraud far beyond the walls of a team’s campus, the university’s basketball staff completed more than 100 assignments in online courses for recruits attending two-year institutions. The case comes less than three months after the NCAA concluded that a former assistant football coach at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette made arrangements with the head of a Mississippi testing center to falsify the ACT scores of players and recruits.