docked 31 scholarships from 1996 to 1998. Miami had actually self-reported the violations in 1991. However, when the Department of Education got word that school officials helped athletes fraudulently obtain Pell Grants, it asked Miami to stop its own investigation while it conducted its own. Ultimately, 60 athletes were implicated, but all of them avoided criminal charges after being sent through a pretrial diversion program. In 1994, Tony Russell, a former University of Miami academic advisor, pleaded guilty to helping more than 80 student athletes, 57 of whom were football players, falsify Pell Grant applications in exchange for kickbacks from the players themselves. The scandal dated all the way back to 1989 and fraudulently secured more than $220,000 in federal grants. Federal officials later said that Russell had engineered "perhaps the largest centralized fraud ever committed" in the history of the Pell Grant program. In late 1995, the NCAA concluded that, in addition to the fraudulent Pell Grants facilitated by Russell, the university had also provided or allowed over $400,000 worth of other, improper payments to Miami football players. The NCAA also found that the university had failed to wholly implement its drug testing program, and permitted three football student-athletes to compete without being subject to the required disciplinary measures specified in the policy. The NCAA found that this was evidence that school officials didn't have adequate control over the football program. Miami docked itself seven scholarships as part of a self-imposed sanction in 1995, and the NCAA took away another 24 scholarships over the next two years. As a result of the scandal, Sports Illustrated's Alexander Wolff wrote a famed and controversial cover story, arguing that Miami should at least temporarily shut down its football program. On June 21, 1996, Miami football players broke into the apartment of the captain of Miami's track team and struck him repeatedly. In response, Davis suspended three key players for the coming 1996 season, in which the Hurricanes finished 9–3. Davis also suspended two other players who were involved in separate violent incidents. The low point for Miami came in 1997 when they posted a 5–6 record, the first losing season since Howard Schnellenberger's first year in 1979. The 1997 season saw the Hurricanes suffer one of the program's most humiliating losses, a 47–0 beating at the hands of in-state rival Florida State. The Hurricanes began to reassert themselves in 1998, when they