Maryland hoops got one of the stiffest penalties I can recall a major basketball program receiving back in the early 90s: 3 years probation (can't recall the details of the probation as far as scholarships go, but they were playing walk-ons for a good long while), no TV games for a year, and a 2-year ban from the post-season. This was due to the panicked hire of Bob Wade by the administration after Lenny Bias' death and Lefty Driesell's "resignation" over his rampant disregard of anything resembling a rule or such ephemeral concepts as players even pretending to go to class. Lefty knew the rules and broke them anyway; Wade had no clue what the rules were and got caught lying about 80 million times to the NCAA. Some of the stuff he got nailed for was garbage, but the NCAA piled onto an already sinking program and damned near killed it.
I'm not saying the NCAA was wrong (Lefty should have been busted years before because he just didn't give a flying #### - I love him), just that they saw a wounded duck and fired both barrels. Also, it's important to keep in mind that this was right around the time they hammered SMU football and the War On Drugs' cocaine panic.
At that point in time, I thought "Maryland will be decades coming back from this". This was before the internet and not having any TV games, even if for only a year, was recruiting death. On top of that, they had made an already-bad situation with a rich recruiting base twice as bad. Baltimore HS coaches had already started steering their best players away from Maryland after the Ernie Graham fiasco in the early 80s. Maryland's rush to hire Wade (who ran the best program in the city) after the departures of Lefty/Bias was mostly to try mend this chasm in one fell swoop. Then...... Wade turned out to be way out of his element. He drew good players but got busted, too. That pissed off the Baltimore HS hoops scene even more (Wade was a "victim", though I know some coaches there were secretly happy he got nailed because he was such an #######).
Three things saved Maryland from a loooooong recovery:
1. Timing. They had already hired Gary Williams before the NCAA back-doored Maryland by doubling some of the penalties they had intimated were to come. Gary stayed anyway.
2. Walt Williams could have left. Gary Williams has said in countless interviews that his success at MD owes everything to Williams electing to stay. Walt was an All-America talent and a local kid. When he decided not to use his get-out-of-jail-free card, you could feel the whole region relax. He knew he'd be playing with lesser players and on losing teams.
3. Keith Booth - the most celebrated Baltimore City HS player in his class - signed with Maryland a couple of years later.
(if there's a 4th, it's that Maryland caught lightening in a bottle a year after Booth with Joe Smith and then they were pretty much all of the way back)
Anyway, I know most of you guys don't care about this ancient history and the world is different than it was 25-30 years ago. I just wanted to relay what it felt like when the school I root for had the stiffest penalties imagined imposed.