KU Jayhawks AD talks NCAA case timeline, potential football stadium renovation

Kansas athletic director Travis Goff said he didn’t have specific updates with a timeline for KU’s pending NCAA men’s basketball infractions case, but he indicated that it appears to be trending toward having a resolution after the 2021-22 season.

Goff, who was hired by KU in April, spoke to reporters Wednesday morning at Big 12 men’s basketball media day at T-Mobile Center.

“I think you’ve got to be prepared for anything. I think again, one of our responsibilities is to make sure we’re prepared for anything that might play itself out,” Goff said when asked if he anticipated a final resolution coming after the KU basketball season. “Every week that goes by, you start to feel like that it looks more like it’s coming off of the season in some juncture, but we’ll be prepared for any of the scenarios that might be out there.”

Last week, the Independent Accountability Resolution Process put up a retroactive timeline of KU’s case on its website. KU’s last entry — from late August — was still under an “Investigation” heading. Other school timelines on the site, like those from Louisville and Arizona, show those programs have already received an Amended Notice of Allegations.

KU received its original notice of allegations on Sept. 23, 2019, as the NCAA Enforcement staff charged the athletic department with seven violations, which included five for men’s basketball; each of those basketball charges were Level I — or the most severe — while KU also cited with lack of institutional control.

Goff said KU Athletics did not receive any new information from the IARP when the public timeline was released last week.

“We don’t have any new dates or indicators,” he said, “about what the timeline might look like going forward.

Goff also spoke about where KU Athletics sits when it comes to a potential renovation of Booth Memorial Stadium. He said he’d looked at the master plans made from previous years when KU looked into the project and now was looking into what would be needed to fund a project like that.

“We can’t do that project without the ability to have philanthropic fundraising fuel in it,” Goff said. “There are other levers to pull on with revenues and partnerships and all those things, but if you don’t have a healthy core of people ready to step up and be part of it and believe in what we can show them with football, right — because it’s not going to show up in a bunch of wins right now — but you can show it in other ways and educate in other ways.

“And so then it’s really just about relationships and being out there with our people, getting to know them, establishing trust and rapport.”

Goff said he believed that recent conference realignment had added some weight to talks of renovating or reconstructing Booth Memorial Stadium, which celebrated its 100th anniversary last weekend.

“You can’t tell people you’re invested in locked in on football unless you have all the tangible indicators, and the most tangible indicator for us is that stadium that we play it on Saturdays,” Goff said. “So I do think in a really great way, there’s a little bit more urgency in that.”