Arkansas' basketball squad will begin its season with nearly half of the team suspended for various types of troublemaking.
Two players were suspended from the team Friday for making private calls on the athletic department's long-distance telephone service, an incident that involves 20 scholarship athletes. Five other basketball players on the 16-man roster already faced punishment: four for a February serial sex incident and one for damaging a student's car.For the first few games of the 1991-92 season, the nine non-suspended players, including one walk-on, may find it hard to maintain coach Nolan Richardson's "40 minutes of hell" - a smothering defense that used a deep bench to make Arkansas a basketball power.
"We'll manage. We'll carry on. It's too good of a program not to," Frank Broyles, the university's athletic director said Friday after announcing the suspension of Clyde Fletcher, a senior, and Ray Biggers, a freshman. Both are forwards.
Richardson was on a recruiting trip in Tulsa, Okla., and Detroit, and was unavailable for comment, his wife said.
Broyles was criticized this spring when four players involved in a serial sex incident weren't immediately suspended from the team. Eventually, second team All-American Todd Day, Elmer Martin, Roosevelt Wallace and Darrell Hawkins were suspended from the team through November.
Day reportedly was given another month on the sidelines after being linked to allegations of cheating on a biology test.
Oliver Miller, the star center, recently was suspended for two or three games for damaging a student's car.
The latest suspensions are part of wide misuse of the athletic department's long-distance telephone service. Broyles said telephone records show that 20 current scholarship athletes made private calls totaling about $2,200. Some non-athletes probably misused the service, too, he said.
The athletes were suspended from school in May after the end of the spring semester, when the calls were discovered, Broyles said.