Donnie Tyndall introduced at Chipola College

When the NCAA dropped a 10 year show cause penalty on former Southern Miss men’s Basketball Coach Donnie Tyndall, USA Today called it “the most severe penalty handed out to a coach in NCAA history.”

More than five years later, Tyndall is making his return to the college ranks for the first time since.

This afternoon, Tyndall was formally introduced as the next head man at Chipola College, an NJCAA Division I school in Marianna, Florida.

After winning 60 games in two years at Southern Miss, Tyndall spent one year at Tennessee before having to face the music for his various infractions at USM.

All this time later, Tyndall maintains that he had no direct knowledge of the alleged academic fraud, but also says what’s done is done and the past is the past. “The elephant in the room everyone would probably want to talk about or ask about is okay Coach, well, what happened at Tennessee? Why are you not coaching in the NCAA? Etc. And that’s something that is just part of my story. Everybody in life goes through different adversities or different things that hit them right between the eyes for lack of a better term. I went through a situation at Tennessee where we had NCAA violations at Southern Miss. I could bore you with a long two-hour story. Do I agree with the penalty that was given? 100 percent, no. But that being said, do I take full responsibility because things happened under my watch? 100 percent, yes. They were on my watch. I’ve never wavered from that. I was responsible. I’ve suffered the penalty and the consequences, and we’ve tried to look ahead and not to look back.”

Since his unceremonious firing from Tennessee, Tyndall has been coaching in the NBA Developmental League with both the Raptors and most recently the Pistons.