Report: Baylor hoops teams facing NCAA sanctions

Scott Drew, left, could have his program hit with sanctions later this week by the NCAA. (US Presswire)

So begins what many have expected/waited for. Baylor basketball -- both the men and women's teams -- could be sanctioned by the NCAA due to more than 1,200 illegal phone calls/texts, according to ESPN.com's Jason King.

The timeline on the impermissible activity is more than two years; 29 months, to be exact, according to ESPN.com's report. The story alleges this investigation on behalf of the NCAA has gone on for years (since 2008), and in fact Baylor's known about what the NCAA found out since October, when the organization sent Baylor a packet of its findings.

The school has reportedly already self-imposed penalties, hoping to soften the blow from the NCAA whenever it decides what kind of punishment to dole out to both programs. It's not known when exactly the NCAA will announce its sanctions against Baylor, but that could come this week.

The self-imposed penalties include a docking of a scholarship for this past season and 2012-13 for the men's team, as well as a ban on recruiting phone calls from Jan. 1 to Feb. 29 of this past season for head coach Scott Drew and assistant Jerome Tang. The men's team had their official-visit list whittled from 12 to seven for the 2012-13 recruiting class.

Women's head coach Kim Mulkey can't recruit off-campus this summer, and her team was also clipped of two scholarships this past season. The women's program also denied assistant Damion McKinney from making calls since the start of the year, and that will remain protocol until May 1, according to ESPN.com's report.

Calls to Baylor by CBSSports.com Monday morning were not immediately returned.

To be clear, we're dealing with phone calls and text messages (common, viewed-as-minor violations on the whole), the rules of which have changed in the past year. (Coaches can now text recruits as much as they please following June 15 of their sophomore year of high school.) But Baylor was monitored well before those legislation changes came, and because the volume of calls and texts is so high, the NCAA could very well eye these violations more severely.

More from ESPN.com:

Combined, the men's and women's basketball programs sent 738 impermissible text messages and made 528 impermissible calls over a span of nearly two-and-a-half years.

The probe also determined that former men's assistant Mark Morefield committed a major violation when he attempted to influence two AAU coaches to furnish the NCAA with false and misleading information regarding a series of text messages. Morefield resigned in July 2011.

The report concluded that Drew demonstrated a "failure to monitor" the activities of two of his assistant coaches and that there was also an overall "failure to monitor" by the institution, which found 405 additional impermissible calls and text messages from nine different sports, ranging from football to the equestrian program, from January-July 2011, during its investigation.

Men's assistant basketball coaches Paul Mills and Jerome Tang were also named in the report along with women's basketball assistant coach Damion McKinney.

The women's team stands to be in as much trouble/hot water because the recruitment of Britney Griner is in play. Griner is one of the transcendent women's players ever. The Bears just went 40-0 and won a national title thanks to her dominance inside.

Now the NCAA is ready to expose both programs in Waco? What a turn. Not necessarily unexpected, but still, it's a big story in college athletics.

The majority of the men's violations date back to '07 and '08. And it gets hairier, thanks to something called "Teleflip," a program that Baylor could've been using as means of subterfuge in order to get by the texts rule. Teleflip converts text messages into emails, which are/were not seen as the same means of communication by the NCAA. (Outdated view on technology: check.)

"The report also indicated that, in 2007, four men associated with recruiting services were paid between $200 and $500 to cover Drew's elite camp, where they were charged with selecting the camp's all-star team and evaluating each of the prospects. The practice violated NCAA rules, and the failure of Baylor's compliance office to monitor the camp was noted in the report," according to ESPN.com.