Ben Thomas is Currently Serving NCAA Probation

Vin was fired from Stanford and Oregon. That’s true , how they did it another question. It’s similar to when Vigilante got asked to leaved Virginia for having an affair with a female student. When you have athletic success and do bad things like both these coaches you get asked to leave ( AKA fired ). Now Vin didn’t have an affair with an athlete like Vig but he was scamming big time and was cheating at Stanford. And he pissed of the big man at Nike to get the boot from Oregon.
If Vin is reporting other coach’s do tamping he’s pathetic.

Vin Lananna should stop opening his mouth then. He did it to himself

Tampering is the way for the NCAA to hand out violations for nothing

Letsrun mods why would remove my quote telling the Vin obsessed dirtbags that they are wrong and fact checking them? Is Brosnan paying you?

What’s your obsession with Sean Brosnan? He has zero to do with Ben Thomas and his NCAA debacle. Lananna is an old grumpy man who’s worn out his welcome everyplace he goes for good reason. Yeas and years of lying and treating people like dirt does that to a person

Stop misguiding this thread. This is about a NCAA violation. What does this mean for Thomas ?

I think this means Ben Thomas cheated. It means it was so obvious without a doubt. Regardless of who reported it, but it’s not a good look for an Olympic Champion coach to be caught cheating

This is a find point. Not a good look for Ben or Cole right now.

I looked at the roster and said runner isn’t even a top runner. Why risk it unless he wanted the BF transfer from same school. If you’re going to break the rules make it worth it.

Tampering, as the NCAA enforces it, isn’t even a consistent concept, it’s whatever they decide it is in a given case. They’ve clearly shifted their interpretation depending on the situation. Take the Brosnan case as an example: the NCAA essentially argued a coach couldn’t even speak with a longtime friend if that friend had a kid at another school. That’s an absurd stretch of the rule.
And what evidence did they have? None. No emails, no texts, no DMs, no scholarship offers, nothing that actually demonstrates recruiting misconduct. It was all inference and optics, not proof.
That’s why cases like this, and even the Ben Thomas situation, feel inconsistent and arbitrary. Meanwhile, certain coaches like Vin Lananna come off as overly eager to report or escalate things that don’t materially impact competitive integrity.
At some point, it stops being about enforcing rules and starts looking like selective interpretation.

You're right. You should make a thread about it.

Tampering is easily the most vague and selectively enforced rule the NCAA has. It’s honestly the lamest thing they try to police. Meanwhile athletes are making millions, and rival coaches are out here reporting each other over this? Ben probably doesn’t give a sh*t. The whole thing is a joke 😂

From reading through the actual report, some takeaways I have are:

- They definitely violated the rules by not waiting until the athletes entered the portal

- That said, this doesn't seem like a very nefarious thing. The athletes likely would have come to VT anyways and this seems like just a procedural slip-up of starting the process with them too early

So it makes sense that he is being punished for it (anyone who breaks the rules should be), but this doesn't materially change my perception of Thomas given the nature of the violation.

On Lananna, since he somehow became the focus of the thread: while I don't have a strong opinion either way of him, he admittedly was involved in two clear recruiting violations that I've heard about:

1. I've heard a rumor from multiple people that when Lukas Verzbicas visited Oregon, they had Nike agents come meet with him on his visit and said Nike would give him a better contract after college if he came to Oregon. This is admittedly third hand info - for example, one source is people on the OK State team who heard it from Dave Smith, who was pissed but didn't want to make a big thing of it and report it

2. After one of my friends finished competing in a meet at Oregon, when they got back to where their gear was Vin's business card was sitting on top of their backpack.

Tampering is 90% nothing. In this case and many others. People use it to make it sound like somthing bad. Reading this case there is not much info and Brosnan’s case are the two track a field tampering cases of recent we know of. Ben Thomas seemed to have has been caught and had no choice but to admitting it, but Brosnan’s case was it was a stretch to not allow a coach to talk to a Friend. Neither of these coaches were ever banned from coaching in the NCAA because they violations are nothing more them the NCAA pretending to do their jobs

Getting popped for NCAA violations while coaching an Olympic medalist? That’s a terrible look. You’d think someone operating at that level wouldn’t need to play those games, but here we are.

He's a coach of an OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALIST. This a minor NCAA violation that does not tarnish a damn thing about his reputation.

Most NCAA coaches of 30+ years get a couple of small violations throughout their careers. Things like accidentally emailing a sophomore because the track meet results had his graduating year listed incorrectly, etc.

The key is to not get several in your first year as a coach so you don't ruin your coaching career. That would be really unfortunate.