coach at Boston College from 1977 to 1982 and Pearl had served as his team student-manager. Pearl/Thomas incident (1988–1989) During the 1988–89 basketball season, Pearl, then an assistant coach at Iowa, was at the center of a recruiting scandal involving Illinois. Both Illinois and Iowa were recruiting Deon Thomas, a top high school player from Chicago. Pearl lost this recruiting battle when Thomas committed to Illinois. Thereafter, Pearl called the high school student and recorded a phone conversation with Thomas, which may have been illegal depending on where Pearl originated the call. (Illinois requires prior consent of all participants to monitor or record a phone conversation according to Ill. Rev. Stat. Ch. 38, Sec. 14–2; Iowa, where Pearl was coaching at the time, only requires one party's consent to record a phone conversation.) During the conversation, Pearl asked Thomas if he had been offered an SUV and cash by Illinois assistant coach Jimmy Collins, and Thomas seemed to indicate that he had. Pearl then turned over copies of the tapes to the NCAA, accompanied by a memo describing the events. During the subsequent NCAA investigation, Thomas denied the allegations and said the story was false, that he was agreeing with Pearl only to try to get rid of him. Thomas later passed a polygraph test in which he denied Pearl's accusation of Illinois's offering cash and a car. The NCAA did not find Illinois guilty of any wrongdoing relating to Thomas's recruitment, finding that the purported evidence provided was not "credible, persuasive and of a kind on which reasonably prudent persons rely in the conduct of serious affairs." Because the investigation uncovered other violations, however, including Illinois's third major violation in six years, the NCAA cited Illinois with a "lack of institutional control" charge and implemented several recruiting restrictions and a one-year postseason ban. When Pearl and Collins were both head coaches for four years in the Horizon League, the two men never engaged in the traditional postgame handshake, reportedly due to lingering feelings over the incident. When Thomas was asked about forgiving Pearl in a 2005 interview, he was quoted as saying, "It's hard to forgive a snake." Thomas went on to become the University of Illinois's all-time leading scorer. Southern Indiana (1992–2001) In 1992, Pearl got his first head-coaching job, at Southern Indiana. He inherited a Screaming Eagles team that had won just 10 games in the previous