Report: IU spent $15,000 to investigate former football coach

IU paid more than $15,000 to have a law firm investigate the school's football program in the months before the school fired coach Gerry DiNardo.\nThat 2004 investigation, reported Sunday by The Indianapolis Star, went on as the athletic department grappled with a $5 million debt.\nThat probe by Indianapolis law firm Ice Miller found four of what the NCAA calls "secondary" violations but did not turn up any major infractions.\nJennifer Brinegar, assistant athletic director for compliance, said she did not know of any other time when IU had hired any outside attorney to investigate possible NCAA violations.\nFollowing interviews with 23 people and an extensive review of documents, Ice Miller found, among other things, that some players had interpreted an e-mail regarding summer conditioning as making sessions mandatory rather than voluntary and that some players exceeded the daily limit on "countable athletically related activities" during the season.\nThe NCAA accepted IU's self-imposed penalties in each case.\nDiNardo, who said he had not seen the report, was fired Dec. 1, 2004, after three \nseasons at the school and an 8-27 record.\nIU is responsible for paying the coach through the end of his contract in June 2007. Those payments will amount to more than $600,000 after he was fired.\nIU would not have owed the coach anything had he been fired "for just cause" because of "a serious and intentional violation of a major rule."\nDiNardo told the newspaper that he thought the probe might have been prompted by allegations by an assistant coach he fired. He also claimed the school violated its own rules by remotely accessing his laptop computer without informing him until afterward.\n"We are not going to publicly debate the details of what was at issue in this investigation, nor the processes that were used," said IU spokesman Larry MacIntyre. He added that the University "acted quickly and appropriately."\nIU told the NCAA in a December 2004 letter that outside counsel had been retained in July of that year to investigate "possible violations that were reported to various athletics administrators since the end of the 2003-04 academic year."\nIU did not release the final report submitted by the law firm, citing the attorney-client exception in public \nrecords law.