BLOOMINGTON — Want a quick answer on how Indiana University got into this basketball phone call mess and how the NCAA Committee on Infractions will respond to it?

Forget it. As IU spokesman Larry MacIntyre says, “It’s way too complex.”

First, when it comes to violations, the 10-member NCAA committee means business. It consists of three attorneys and seven university employees that include a law professor, a conference commissioner and an athletic director.

“The Committee on Infractions members are no-nonsense,” says Tom Reiter. He’s a Purdue associate athletic director in charge of compliance.

Reiter and the Boilermakers experienced that firsthand with violations in their women’s basketball program. Women’s assistant coach Katrina Merriweather made 111 impermissible calls plus committed academic fraud by typing, correcting and revising a school paper for former player Cherelle George during the 2005-2006 season.

Like IU, Purdue discovered the problem and reported it to the NCAA. It fired Merriweather and took away a scholarship. The committee decided last August that wasn’t enough and took away two more scholarships, plus put the program on probation for two years.

“It was a lesson learned,” Reiter says. “It was an eye-opener.”

IU might receive a similar lesson depending on how the committee views the phone call irregularities involving coach Kelvin Sampson and his staff.

Sampson made 10 three-way calls between himself, a recruit and assistant coach Rob Senderoff that violated the terms of his Oklahoma sanctions. But it’s the calls that exceeded NCAA limits for recruits that might be the bigger problem.

Sampson has said his staff made “thousands of calls” during the 12-month period from May 25, 2006, to May 25, 2007. MacIntyre says those calls included high school coaches, AAU coaches, players, parents, principals and a number of other people.

Coaches across the country make a similar number of calls, says Dave Telep, national recruiting director for Scout.com, a national Internet recruiting service. Much of it depends on how large a pool of players a school recruits. Some of it is caused by recruits often being surrounded by people of influence. College coaches must develop relationships with all of them.

“You might have a father and a mother living at different places,” Telep says. “You might have one or two AAU coaches, and then the high school coach. There could be another coach around that guy. You have one recruit, and you might have 10 relationships to keep up with.

“And then maybe you call an opposing coach in the (high school) conference to ask what he thought of the recruit. You might call the principal, the guidance counselor. Exponentially, the number of calls is enormous at the end of the day.”

Just as daunting as making those calls are recording them. That’s why all universities have policies to monitor the process and ensure NCAA rules are followed.

When Sampson was hired in March 2006, IU officials insisted they had a policy to ensure the problems that surfaced at Oklahoma (Sampson was penalized for 577 impermissible calls) wouldn’t happen at Indiana.

Then last Sunday, IU officials announced they did happen.

After a two-month investigation by the Indianapolis law firm of Ice Miller, MacIntyre says at least 35 impermissible calls were made by assistant coaches. There were another 65 or so calls that might have been impermissible, but Ice Miller attorneys were unable to determine their exact nature.

“They don’t know who answered the phone,” MacIntyre says. “They don’t even know if the phone was answered.”

What they do know is those calls were not documented. Most, if not all, were made from the coaches’ homes.

“Those calls could not be accounted for in the logs,” MacIntyre says.

Each coach is required to fill out a phone log. This log records who he called and for how long. It also records whether or not the coach reached the recruit. Leaving a message is not considered a contact, but it has to be recorded.

MacIntyre says IU coaches are required to turn in logs monthly. That’s typical of most colleges. Reiter says Purdue compliance officials “look at those logs each month, and sporadically, we get phone bills to cross-check.” Iowa associate athletic director Mary Curtis says logs have to be updated every two to four weeks, and “we’d like them every two weeks.” Iowa also has a Web-linked system so coaches can record calls “anywhere in the world.”

“There’s no reason why their data can’t be up-to-date,” she says.

Curtis says most institutions have language in their coaches’ contracts regarding “willful violations.” She says if coaches are making excessive phone calls from home and not logging them, “that’s a fireable offense.”

“That’s a willful act,” she says. “Making calls and not declaring them means the integrity of the person is in question. You’d have an investigation to determine whether the coach knew he was making impermissible calls. And if he didn’t know, why wasn’t he logging them. That’s another reason why the athletic director would dismiss you.”

Reiter says Purdue has the same rules in place.

“The responsibility for the accuracy of those logs is on the coach who signs it,” he says. “If you sign a log and leave off a number of calls, you can be subject to termination. We’ve been through this. We don’t want to go through it again.”

As far as IU’s policy, MacIntyre didn’t know the specifics, and a call to the school’s compliance office was not returned. J.D. Campbell, IU media relations director, says school officials have been instructed not to talk about the situation pending the NCAA review.

The Indiana report, which comes to 400 pages, has not yet been released. The News-Sentinel has request a copy through the Freedom of Information Act. IU officials say the will release the report after names and other personal information have been removed.

Sampson has indicated the calls were “mistakes” and “clerical errors” and not deceptions. He characterized them as violations of “omission” and not “commission.” He used similar terms while describing the 577 impermissible calls at Oklahoma.

When it comes to impermissible calls, there is no margin for error, Curtis says.

“A violation is a violation. There’s no such thing as quality of violation. You report any violation.”

NCAA rules stipulate no contact can be made with high school freshmen. Coaches can call sophomores and juniors once a month. They can call seniors twice a week until they sign a letter of intent. Then there is no limit on the number of calls.

Calling a parent is the same as calling the recruit. The only exception is when the parent is the high school coach. There are no limits to calling coaches or principals or guidance counselors or other guardians or mentors.

Also, recruits and their families can call coaches as much as they want.

College coaches are normally assigned a region of the country to recruit and are responsible for contacting those recruits. That helps avoid the possibility of two coaches calling the same recruit in the same time period.

Curtis says there are two common inadvertent errors. The first is when two coaches contact the same recruit in the same week.

“One of them screwed up,” Curtis says. “As a staff, we screwed up. That has to be self-reported.”

Another common mistake is when a coach goes to a tournament and, for example, the program lists a recruit as a junior when he is really a sophomore. So the coach sends him a recruiting letter and a questionnaire, which is permissible only with juniors and seniors. That, too, is a violation.

If coaches are recording their logs properly, Curtis and Reiter say, they would catch inadvertent mistakes. They are expected to immediately report them. Compliance personnel would file a report with the NCAA. They’d also address it with the coaches involved.

“We’d send a strong message to our coach to make sure he realizes he has to be more diligent,” Curtis says.

IU athletic director Rick Greenspan says the Hoosiers’ self-imposed sanctions (Sampson losing a $500,000 bonus, the program losing one scholarship, Senderoff being banned from calling recruits or recruiting off campus for a year, plus losing a bonus and a raise for next season) sends a strong message.

The problem? It came one year too late.