Accepted money allocated to work at a hospital.
It reminds very much of the Brett Favre situation. What's the difference? KY and Stoops appear to have had a systematic scheme whereby money was taken illegally and immorally from the care of the sick, infirm, and most vulnerable in the community, and KY siphoned it off to illegally pay university football and probably basketball players who didn't actually do the work or speeches they were paid to perform. If the money embezzled were for a volleyball court instead of football players, would that be worse? Is the hospital a non-profit?
Also there is the issue that the football players were falsifying time sheets, which is illegal, and it is almost impossible to believe this was without knowledge of both the university and the hospital. How could any competent manager at the hospital not have noticed that the players claimed falsely and illegally to have "worked" at the hospital during regular football practice hours? And if someone wants to say the non-profit didn't know the work was never performed, well how does a manager not know that a direct report systematically fails to show up at work? And how can the football team credibly claim not have a paid staffer supervising these so-called jobs or paid but unperformed speeches or whatever they were?
In addition, Kentucky is perversely using laws designed to protect students from unnecessary prying in order to run a major coverup and prevent the investigation and reporting of several
crimes, which happen also to be NCAA violations. Under pretense of protecting the student, they are protecting the university and the hospital from scrutiny.
Now Rodriguez's DUI and failure to appear may be less bad, but pretty serious. Failure to appear is an automatic bench warrant. Try it yourself and have your lawyer tell the judge "I forgot."
Rodriguez's non-suspension "suspension" is also weird. He has practiced with the team every day. Is that what suspension means? Maybe that's why Stoops "walked back" or pretended to deny that he ever claimed that Rodriquez was suspended. He was withheld from games. But I'm not sure that is actually a punishment, since it appears that KY will later have to forfeit any games Rodriguez (and any of the others) play in all year -- just in case NCAA rules are somehow applied without bias.
The one thing KY has going for them, since they are a "basketball school" (even though we beat them on the regular) is that allegedly many basketball players are involved in the same illegal payment scheme, and one supposes the Birmingham office and the NCAA both want to coverup basketball corruption at one of their pet schools. Of course an illegal payment scheme in violation of NCAA rules
running across multiple programs is a very serious offense, flirting with lack of institutional control.