Mike Boynton Name-drops NCAA Officials to Hold Them Accountable for NCAA Decision

STILLWATER — Stan Wilcox is a name that not a lot of college sports fans are familiar with, but Mike Boynton wants the public to know about him.

Boynton dropped the names of a handful of NCAA officials Wednesday in a media appearance responding to the program’s postseason ban that was upheld for 2022 in hoping to hold them accountable for what many view as an unjust ruling.

The Cowboys are ineligible for the 2022 NCAA Tournament following NCAA sanctions handed down after the FBI’s probe into college basketball as well as the Big 12 tournament. The sanctions stem from when Lamont Evans was an assistant coach on OSU’s staff. He was fired in 2017 for allegedly accepting bribery money to steer players to agents. No one on Oklahoma State’s roster was in Stillwater when Evans was a coach — so the NCAA is punishing a group of kids for something they weren’t a part of.

So, at OSU’s news conference Wednesday in reaction to the NCAA’s decision to deny the school’s appeal, Boynton let lose with the names of Wilcox, Jon Duncan, Russell Register, Sherika Montgomery, Ellen Ferris, Anthony Jenkins, Jonathan Alger, Allison Rich, David Shipley, Alberto Gonzales, Joel Maturi, Gary Miller, Vincent Nicastro, Larry Parkinson, Thomas Sullivan and Sankar Suryanarayan. In one way or another, all were involved in throwing the book at Oklahoma State.

“Accountability is important to me,” Boynton said. “It’s a pillar of our program. [Wilcox] doesn’t get to skirt it either. We have a circular game of unaccountability. He would tell you, ‘It wasn’t me,’ and he would point to the people who made the decision, and then they would point to somebody else. Ultimately, he’s in charge. No different than I had to come in here and answer questions. When we lose, I gotta answer questions. Coaches get fired. There should be accountability at that level as well.”

So, who is Wilcox? He is the NCAA executive vice president of regulatory affairs after spending time as the Florida State athletic director and vice president. When the NCAA’s involvement in the FBI cases started to take shape, CBS Sports quoted Wilcox in saying “I wouldn’t want to be the first institution to go through [the infractions committee] process.”

“Look at the facts of the case,” Boynton said Wednesday. “… That signifies that in their minds, the end result was already kind of in the bag, with no thought of like, ‘Let’s go through the process and let the facts lead us to the decision.’ That clearly did not happen in this case.”

Boynton mentioned Wilcox’s name four times during the news conference. He mentioned Montgomery, Register and Duncan three times, apiece. There aren’t a ton that even google searches reveal about those three.

Montgomery was a basketball player at Winthrop before working with the Summit League. She was assistant director of enforcement (investigations and processing) at the NCAA before taking on a role with the Missouri Valley Conference. Duncan is the vice president of enforcement. Register is hard to track down even on the NCAA’s website.

The other names Boynton mentioned were either on the appeals committee or the committee of infractions. Boynton made a couple of references to the officials hiding behind their letters: COI (committee on infractions) and IAC (infractions appeals committee).

In his statement in OSU’s release, Boynton invited the NCAA officials to meet with the team, look the players in their eyes and tell them why they aren’t allowed to play in the tournament despite not being in college when the the Evans incident took place.

“Those same people, all of them, if you ask them why they do what they do, they would swear that they do it because they want to help kids have great experiences in college,” Boynton said. “And they would all be lying because they don’t care. Because I guarantee that all the people I named high-fived last night.”