The Point-Shaving Allegations That Shut Down Tulane Basketball

On March 26, 1985, police arrested Tulane center John “Hot Rod” Williams at his home in Sorrento, Louisiana. The charge was sports bribery under Louisiana law. Gary Kranz, a Tulane student who was not a basketball player, was arrested in the same case and charged with the same offense. The arrests converted a gambling investigation into a public criminal proceeding involving one of the university’s most visible athletes. Two days later, police arrested David Dominique and Bobby Thompson, also Tulane basketball players, on sports-bribery charges. The program had become the subject of a criminal case.

The case centered on two games played at Tulane. On February 6, the Green Wave defeated Southern Miss, 64–63. On February 20, Tulane lost to Memphis State, 60–49. Players were accused of shaving points in both contests—not necessarily losing, but controlling the margin so that gamblers could profit against a betting line. The indictments alleged that players received payments for their participation. Those allegations gave prosecutors a mechanism: money would move to players, and ordinary decisions inside a game would become wagers disguised as competition.

The alleged plan began on February 2, the day Tulane was preparing to face Southern Mississippi. Gary Kranz, Mark Olensky, David Rothenberg, Clyde Eads, and Jon Johnson were identified in connection with the planning allegation. Four days later, the Southern Miss game supplied the first contest named in the case. The Memphis State game followed on February 20. The sequence mattered because the accusation was tied to specific dates, opponents, scores, and payments rather than to a general suspicion that gamblers had reached the campus.

The arrests separated the people accused of arranging or facilitating the scheme from the players alleged to have carried it onto the court. Kranz stood outside the roster but inside the charge. Williams, Dominique, and Thompson were connected directly to the games. Thompson later testified against Williams and said he had discussed point shaving with him. That testimony gave the prosecution an account from within the team. It also placed the players’ conversations, rather than only their box scores, at the center of the criminal case.

Tulane’s response did not wait for the criminal proceedings to resolve. On April 5, President Eamon M. Kelly announced that he would ask the university board to permanently disband the men’s basketball program. The decision treated the allegations as an institutional crisis involving cash payments and violations of college athletics rules. Kelly possessed authority over the university’s response; he used it to seek the removal of the program itself, not merely the suspension of individual players. The proposed remedy reached beyond the defendants and onto everyone connected to Tulane basketball.

The coaching staff left that same day. Head coach Ned Fowler resigned, as did assistant coaches Max Pfeifer and Mike Richardson. Their departures came while the charges were still moving through court, before the case had produced a final judgment against Williams. A coach could control lineups, practices, and the daily boundaries around players. The resignations showed that Tulane was assigning institutional consequence before the legal process had finished assigning criminal responsibility. The university’s action moved faster than the courtroom.

That speed reflected the different standards governing a university and a criminal trial. Prosecutors had to establish violations of Louisiana’s sports-bribery laws against particular defendants. Tulane’s president and board faced a broader question: whether the men’s basketball program could continue to represent the university after allegations of paid manipulation had attached themselves to its games and players. Kelly answered by seeking permanent abolition. By July 1985, Tulane had eliminated the men’s basketball program. The season’s alleged misconduct had become a permanent administrative decision.

The shutdown also fixed the scandal in public memory before every courtroom question had been answered. Tulane had not merely suspended competition or dismissed a player. It had removed the men’s program from the university’s athletic structure. The arrests of Williams, Kranz, Dominique, and Thompson supplied the criminal frame; the resignations supplied the coaching frame; Kelly’s announcement supplied the institutional frame. Each response enlarged the consequences. What began with two alleged point-shaved games now included lost jobs, a dismantled program, and defendants facing charges under state law.

Williams’s legal fate did not follow the university’s decision. He was arrested on March 26 and charged in the sports-bribery case, but a charge was not a conviction. On June 16, 1986, a jury found him not guilty in his second trial. The verdict did not restore Tulane basketball, return Fowler to the bench, or reverse the university’s 1985 decision. It established a separate consequence: the player whose arrest had helped define the scandal was acquitted after the program associated with him had already disappeared.

The case therefore left two outcomes operating at once. Tulane’s men’s basketball program was eliminated in 1985 after the president acted on allegations of bribery, payments, and point shaving. Williams was later found not guilty in his second trial. The criminal process addressed an individual defendant; the university addressed the institution’s willingness to continue sponsoring the program. Those decisions did not produce the same answer. By June 1986, the court had rejected the case against Williams, while Tulane’s basketball program remained absent because the university had already made its decision.