During his three-plus years as USF men's basketball coach, Jessie Evans was guilty of numerous "secondary" NCAA violations, the school's attorney said Monday night.
"When you have multiple NCAA violations, even if they're minor, the problem you have with the NCAA is called 'loss of control,' " attorney Michael Vartain said. "That means they don't trust that your coach is accountable for the program."
He added, "It's long gone when a coach can just do X's and O's. He has to have good compliance skills. You can't wait till the things fall apart."
Vartain declined to describe the violations in detail, but he said some current and former players had expressed misgivings about Evans' program.
"I have no comment," Evans said of the allegations. "Anything they discuss will have to go through my agent and my attorney."
His attorney, Dan Siegel of Oakland, said, "There's never been any evidence of NCAA violations. They basically told Jessie to request a leave or you're fired. Now that we're talking about filing a lawsuit, you're hearing a lot of unsubstantiated allegations."
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Tom FitzGerald
Chronicle Staff Writer
tfitzgerald@sfchronicle.com