The NCAA Committee on Infractions on Friday placed the Auburn men's basketball program on four years' probation and suspended coach Bruce Pearl for two games after saying he failed to adequately monitor former assistant coach Chuck Person and did not promote an atmosphere of compliance.
The long-anticipated ruling comes more than four years after Person was arrested and charged in September 2017 with accepting bribes from a financial adviser who was working as an informant for the federal government.
Pearl, who has a 145-93 record in eight seasons at Auburn, is the first head coach to be penalized in a case related to the federal investigation. It's the second time he has been sanctioned by the NCAA; he was given a three-year show-cause penalty in 2011 after allegedly misleading investigators about his program's impermissible contact with recruits while coaching at Tennessee. In March 2014, Auburn hired him before the show-cause order had expired.