No real news here, so don't be alarmed at all by the headline, but in any event UA released today all the secondary violations that it has reported to the NCAA in the past two years. Per Don Kausler, Jr.:
At a rate of roughly two per month, Alabama has reported 44 secondary violations of NCAA rules in the past two years, more than one-third of which involve the football program.
Most of the violations are minor, with one-fourth resulting in nothing more than rules education as a correction action. Roughly one-third of the violations involve impermissible text messages to recruits.
Click here for the full report from RollTide.com (warning: PDF).
Secondary violations are fairly routine just given the expansive nature of NCAA rules, and as a general matter they are simply bound to occur from time-to-time. In fact, at some point reporting very few secondary violations is actually given a skeptical view by the NCAA. The idea is that, given the inescapable nature of minor violations, a lack of self-reporting casts the compliance department as very weak and as not actively investigating their athletic programs as they should be doing. With that in mind, there is nothing out of the ordinary here for UA, so no worries.
Nevertheless, it's somewhat interesting to look into the exceedingly boring minutiae of NCAA rules compliance. For example, an S&C staff member was admonished, required to take additional rules education, and was permitted from speaking with a prospective student athlete after said prospective student-athlete called him and the staff member returned the call not knowing who it was. In other words, someone like Scott Cochran missed a phone call from an unidentified number, re-dialed the number for a quick "Who the hell is this?", and boom, NCAA violation. Fire up the fax machine and get this up to Indianapolis ASAP so we can ask for a thousand pardons. That, in essence, is how you comply with all of these inane NCAA rules.
And as for the S&C staff member, I guess this was all before we figured out "I didn't know" is the NCAA equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card, right?