Updated: April 10, 2013, 6:45 PM ET
Iowa State released fresh details Wednesday of its internal investigation into NCAA recruiting violations, saying it found “a significant number” of impermissible calls and text messages made by coaches in football, men’s basketball and several other sports.
The report said Iowa State’s two-year investigation started with the discovery of improper contacts with recruits by Keith Moore, a former Cyclones player who was working in his first year as an undergraduate student coach under Fred Hoiberg.
The report said Hoiberg ran into Moore in 2011 at one of Hoiberg’s son’s AAU games. Hoiberg asked why he was present at the game and whether he’d been contacting recruits. Moore admitted that he had been in contact with high school players that he had coached previously in AAU, the report said.
Hoiberg reported the incident to the athletics department, which removed Moore of his duties with the team and started an investigation. Moore couldn’t be reached for comment Wednesday.
The report says an audit of three years of telephone and text messaging by coaching staff found “a significant number of recruiting communication violations involving most of its sports programs.” Moore sent 160 impermissible text messages to his former AAU players, including two that were being recruited by Iowa State at the time, the report found.
Coaches made 24 “clear-cut intentional” telephone call violations, and other employees made 55 impermissible calls, the report found. Employees failed to log another 1,400 calls that failed to connect with recruits for reasons such as no answer or dropped calls, the report said. In all, the university faulted itself for failing to monitor the calls.
The university said the improper calls were a tiny fraction of the 750,000 that were reviewed over the three-year period involving all 18 sports programs. The university has asked the NCAA to accept its findings and issue a punishment of two years of probation.
The university said it agreed with NCAA’s enforcement staff that the findings “constitute a major infractions case,” given the number and frequency of telephone call violations and the volume of messages sent by Moore.
“We’ve been committed to being as transparent as possible throughout this entire process, which has been challenging given it has been an ongoing investigation and we did not receive the final report until this week,” Jamie Pollard, the Iowa State athletic director, said in a statement.
Copyright 2013 by The Associated Press
This article was originally posted on ESPN.com