The Pearl best hits list:
During the 1988–89 basketball season, Pearl, then an assistant coach at Iowa, was at the center of a recruiting scandal involving Illinois. Both Illinois and Iowa were recruiting Deon Thomas, a top high school player from Chicago. Pearl lost this recruiting battle when Thomas committed to Illinois. Thereafter, Pearl called the high school student and recorded a phone conversation with Thomas, which may have been illegal depending on where Pearl originated the call. (Illinois requires prior consent of all participants to monitor or record a phone conversation according to Ill. Rev. Stat. Ch. 38, Sec. 14–2; however, Iowa, where Pearl was coaching at the time, only requires one party's consent to record a phone conversation.) During the conversation, Pearl asked Thomas if he had been offered an SUV and cash by Illinois assistant coach Jimmy Collins, and Thomas seemed to indicate that he had. Pearl then turned over copies of the tapes to the NCAA, accompanied by a memo describing the events. During the subsequent NCAA investigation, Thomas denied the allegations and said the story was false, that he was agreeing with Pearl only to try to get rid of him. Thomas later passed a polygraph test in which he denied Pearl's accusation of Illinois's offering cash and a car. The NCAA did not find Illinois guilty of any wrongdoing relating to Thomas's recruitment, finding that the purported evidence provided was not "credible, persuasive and of a kind on which reasonably prudent persons rely in the conduct of serious affairs."[3] However, since the investigation uncovered other violations, including Illinois's third major violation in six years, the NCAA cited Illinois with a "lack of institutional control" charge and implemented several recruiting restrictions and a one-year post-season ban.
When Pearl and Collins were both head coaches for four years in the Horizon League, the two men never engaged in the traditional postgame handshake, reportedly due to lingering feelings over the incident. When Thomas was asked about forgiving Pearl in a 2005 interview, he was quoted as saying, "It's hard to forgive a snake."[4] Thomas went on to become the University of Illinois's all-time leading scorer.
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In the summer of 2008, Pearl invited high school junior Aaron Craft and members of his family to a cookout at his Knoxville home while Craft was on an unofficial visit to Tennessee. At the cookout, Pearl said that Craft wasn't allowed to be there under NCAA rules, but encouraged all those in attendance not to tell anyone about it. When the NCAA began an investigation of the affair, Pearl not only lied about the cookout, but also told Craft's father to lie as well.[9]
On September 10, 2010, Pearl acknowledged the violations in the Craft affair, and also admitted lying about it to the NCAA. As a result, Tennessee imposed sanctions on Pearl and his entire staff including $1.5 million in salary reduction over the coming five years and a delayed retention bonus. His off-campus recruiting was also restricted completely from September 4, 2010 to September 23, 2011.[10] On November 20, 2010, the SEC ordered Pearl to sit out Tennessee's first eight SEC games.[11]
After finding out about additional NCAA violations, as well as a violation of the school's substance abuse policy by a player, Tennessee fired Pearl on March 21, 2011—three days after the Vols' blowout loss to Michigan.[12][13][14] On August 23, 2011, Pearl was given a three-year show-cause penalty for lying to the NCAA, effective until August 23, 2014. This meant that the sanctions imposed on Pearl would remain in force if he was hired by an NCAA member school within that period. Specifically, he was prohibited from engaging in any "recruiting activities", which meant he could not contact recruits, although he could evaluate talent during that period. If a school chose to hire him and challenged the NCAA restrictions, it had to appear before the NCAA Committee on Infractions and "show cause" for why the sanctions imposed on Pearl should not follow him to that school.[9] In imposing the penalty, the NCAA said that Pearl's lies turned what would have been a minor case into a major one.[15] His assistant coaches were also given one-year show-cause orders, in effect until August 23, 2012.
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Before Pearl's fourth season at Auburn, his associate head coach Chuck Person was arrested on charges of corruption and bribery.[26] Auburn elected to hold sophomores Austin Wiley and Danjel Purifoy out of games due to eligibility concerns raised over the FBI investigation.[27] Pearl was cited as being uncooperative with Auburn's internal investigation of the program at first, though school president Steven Leath and Pearl have since come to an understanding of expectations for the investigation.[28][29] Despite the scrutiny both internally and externally and losing two players due to the investigation, Pearl has led the 2017–18 team to its best record since 1999
