In May 2019, NCAA vice president of enforcement Jon Duncan walked into a ballroom at the Sandestin Hilton in Destin, Fla. Facing an audience of Southeastern Conference administrators and coaches at the league's annual spring meetings, Duncan repeated his mantra: "Our mission is to protect compliant schools."
At that point, it had been 20 months since federal investigators filed indictments against several college basketball coaches and insiders for their roles in a bribery scheme that exposed the sport's corrupt underground economy. At least a dozen Division I programs were implicated in the scandal, including four SEC programs—Auburn, LSU, Alabama and South Carolina.