Role Ending Misdemeanor / Sports

For many years, amateur and professional sports, as well as e-sports, have frequently provided enjoyment and entertainment for spectators around the world. However, Role Ending Misdemeanors are not uncommon as a person's major misbehavior can sometimes lead to having their jobs, roles, and careers destroyed.

There is a two-week waiting period (after the termination of a role) before an example can be added. This ensures the job loss is accurately reported, actually sticks, and avoids knee-jerk reactions.

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Sports

American Football (Youth and High School)

• In 2013, Randy Burbach was fired from his job as a football coach at Corbett Middle School in Oregon for planning to take his team to Hooters to celebrate the end of the season and refusing to change the venue after multiple requests from the school.
• The entire coaching staff of Cardinal Ritter College Prep, a St. Louis high school, were fired in 2019 after a conspiracy to have running back Bill Jackson play a game in violation of a suspension, wearing a different jersey under the false identity of Marvin Burks, another member of the team who was not present at that game. The scheme was blown due to the distinctive tattoos on Jackson's right arm, forcing the school to nullify their seven-game undefeated season and forfeit the rest. Head coach Brendan Gregory gave a very unconvincing explanation that the school's players supposedly change numbers all the time and he had no idea about the suspension, but no one bought it.

American Football (College)

• In May 2016, Baylor University football coach Art Briles' seven-year tenure came to a sudden halt after a sexual assault scandal involving former football players Tevin Elliot and Sam Ukwuachu broke. In the wake of the scandal, Briles was dismissed. Shortly after, president Ken Starr^note if that name sounds familiar, Starr was the special prosecutor investigating various scandals during the Presidency of Bill Clinton; such as Whitewater and the Monica Lewinsky scandal resigned, along with athletic director Ian McCaw (Briles' boss) and Title IX coordinator Kristan Tucker. Briles coached again in Texas at Mount Vernon High School (in the East Texas area) 3 years after he got fired, but he only lasted 2 seasons before resigning shortly after the end of the 2020 season. In February 2022, he was announced as offensive coordinator at FCS HBCU^*"Historically black colleges and universities", a US legal term for institutions founded to educate African Americans before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Grambling State, but bowed out four days later after massive blowback from fans, alums, and media.
• In November 2011, longtime Pennsylvania State University football coach Joe Paterno's illustrious 45-year career ended abruptly a week after a 10–7 win over Illinois, putting him at a record 409 wins. Paterno was fired by the Penn State Board of Trustees after Jerry Sandusky (Paterno's former defensive head coach) was indicted for child molestation. Paterno, who was to die of cancer two months later, spent the remainder of his life regretting that he hadn't done more—but to this day his role in the scandal and cover-up, if any, remains controversial.^note It should be noted that a major flaw in the investigation that implicated him in the cover-up that had since been exposed was that the details of a key conversation he'd had with athletic director Tim Curley, who also lost his job as a result of the Sandusky Affair, were never investigated properly. Regardless, the university's relationship with the Paterno family became strained in the aftermath of the scandal, and his son Jay's job prospects as a football coach were severely affected in the fallout. The last days of Paterno's life would be chronicled in the 2018 television film, Paterno, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Al Pacino.
  • Related to this, Mike McQueary, the assistant who allegedly saw it occur, waited a day to tell Paterno what happened. When this came out, there were death threats from an Angry Mob. He was soon dismissed from the coaching staff, both for not reporting it to authorities, and probably also for his own safety.
  • Athletic director Tim Curley, Paterno's boss, was a part of the cover-up that also involved the head of campus police Gary Schultz and university president Graham Spanier. All three were let go and were sentenced to jail time and probation for their roles in the scandal.
  • The scandal later cost Greg Schiano a head coaching job offer at the University of Tennessee in 2017, after it came out that Schiano — a defensive backfield coach at Penn State from 1991–95 — had been complicit in covering up the Sandusky Affair during his time there. It didn't help that the UT program had already been going through an Audience-Alienating Era since Phillip Fulmer's retirement in 2008, and the fanbase was pretty much livid at the prospect of Schiano coaching their team for this and other reasons^note among those unrelated reasons was a poor 11-21 record during Schiano's 2 years as head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
• The only time in modern history that the NCAA has ever invoked its infamous "death penalty" ^note in which a school is banned from competing in a sport for a year on a Division I school happened in 1986 when the Southern Methodist University football team was discovered to have maintained a "slush fund" for paying athletes under the table, as well as their families, so as to entice them to play for the school. The NCAA wasted little time in dropping the hammer on SMU: the football team was banned from competing for all of 1987, recruiting or playing at home until 1988,^note they eventually shut down that season outright themselves when it became clear fielding a halfway decent team would be impossible bowl games and live TV until 1989, and put on probation until 1990, losing dozens of scholarships in the process. The unprecedented punishments left few surviving careers for all concerned: head coach Bobby Collins resigned in disgrace shortly after the scandal broke, never to coach again until his death in 2021; school president L. Donald Shields and athletic director Bob Hitch resigned as well; and Bill Clements—who not only chaired SMU's board of governors but was also governor of Texas at the time—fell on his sword and did not run for reelection. SMU would see only one winning season over the next two decades, the conference they were part of eventually ceased to exist in 1996, and the team would not make another bowl appearance until 2009, reenter the national rankings until 2019, or win a conference title until 2023. The immense fallout from this has led the NCAA to only rarely threaten or apply the "death penalty" since then.
• The University of Alabama's football program lost back-to-back head coaches this way:
  • Dennis Franchione, who joined Alabama's football program in 2001 and led it to two winning seasons, was actually more of an inversion. Despite his success, he refused a 10-year contract and quit the team following NCAA sanctions against the program for illegal recruiting schemes.
  • Alabama then hired Washington State coach Mike Price to replace Franchione. University officials knew he had issues with alcohol, and privately reprimanded him. But in May 2003, one night after Price had participated in a pro-am golf tournament in Florida, he spent several hundred dollars at a strip club on drinks and tips, then invited a stripper to spend the night in his hotel room. She used the occasion to charge $1,000 worth of room service to his credit card. He was promptly fired, several months before the season even started. It didn't help that with the infractions that had already cost the team Franchione, Alabama had come an eyelash away from the death penalty the year before, so they clearly weren't about to take any chances with a football coach perfectly willing to flout basic moral standards during the offseason.
• In March 2012, Arkansas Razorbacks head coach Bobby Petrino hired one Jessica Dorrell to a position on his office staff. To the public, Dorrell was 25 and a former Razorbacks volleyball player. What they didn't know: she was his mistress (also keep in mind that he was 51 at the time). That came out a month later after Petrino was involved in a motorcycle accident. After telling the public and Arkansas' athletic director that he had been alone, he was tipped off that the police report on the accident was about to be released. Literally 20 minutes before the report came down, he finally admitted to the AD that Dorrell was his passenger and his mistress.^note He had told the police about her name and presence at the accident scene. Needless to say, he was fired. He's gotten head coaching gigs since then elsewhere, but his post-scandal success, at least at the top level, has so far been limited to the seasons in which Heisman winner and future NFL MVP Lamar Jackson was his QB in Louisville. His most recent head coaching job was at FCS (second-level) Missouri State, and he's since moved on to offensive coordinator jobs, first at Texas A&M^note weeks after being hired for the same position at UNLV and then stunningly back at Arkansas.
• On October 14, 2006, a game between the University of Miami and crosstown rivals Florida International University^*though not yet bitter rivals; this was the first game ever between the schools devolved into a violent bench-clearing brawl during the third quarter. 31 total players were ejected and received mandatory one-game suspensions—including eighteen from FIU, who suspended their participants indefinitely and kicked the instigators, Chris Smith and Marshall McDuffie Jr., off the team outright. Miami, in contrast, only suspended two players indefinitely, which raised questions about coach Larry Coker’s future. Sure enough, Coker was fired at season’s end—just one day after he’d defeated a Top 25 team and believed his job secure, no less—while his FIU counterpart Don Strock resigned after a winless season.
  • The controversies weren’t just limited to the players and staff, either: Lamar Thomas, a former Miami wide receiver (for both his alma mater and the professional Dolphins) who was calling the game for Comcast Sports Southeast (CSS), not only defended the actions of the Miami players but also expressed a desire to actually join the brawl: "I was about to go down the elevator to get in that thing… I say, why don't we meet outside in the tunnel after the ball game and get it on some more?"^note And he may have been serious—he had already twice served jail time for assaulting his fiancée, once when she was pregnant. Not surprisingly, Thomas was fired by CSS two days later.
• George O'Leary resigned his head coaching spot after only five days at the University of Notre Dame when it came to light he lied about lettering at the University of New Hampshire, as he never played any football at UNH. He eventually found later work as the longtime coach of the UCF Knights.
• The University of Pittsburgh was forced to fire Mike Haywood 16 days into his tenure in December 2010 after allegations of domestic violence, making his tenure the second-shortest of any FBS coach in history to George O'Leary.
• Chris Malone, an assistant coach with the Chattanooga Mocs^note the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, not to be confused with the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, was fired for a tweet insulting Stacey Abrams in the wake of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock's victories in the 2021 Senate runoff election in Georgia, comparing her to Fat Albert and accusing her of cheating in the election.
• University of Tennessee football coach Jeremy Pruitt and nine other staffers were fired just one month after Pruitt was connected to alleged improper recruiting activities, which put the football program's future in serious doubt. This was reportedly done by outgoing AD Philip Fulmer himself, who was apparently disappointed that his inevitable retirement would now see him leaving the athletic program he'd personally led to the National Championships in 1998 on a sour note. Comments made by Tyler Baron just before the 2021 season additionally indicate that Pruitt's future job prospects in all levels of football coaching are in jeopardy due to how the 2020 season went down. This was further cemented when the NCAA announced its (long-delayed) penalties to the UT program in 2023; Pruitt received a six-year "show-cause penalty", which effectively blackballed him from any NCAA coaching role for the duration.
• An unusual case of this eventually being reversed was with Todd Hoffner, the head coach of Minnesota State University at Mankato (athletically known simply as "Minnesota State"), an NCAA Division II school. In 2012 a university staffer discovered a video of his unclothed children on a university-issued cell phone. Coming in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, Hoffner was placed on leave from his job right before the season started and was arrested on child pornography charges. Hoffner said it was just a brief video of his kids goofing around after a bath, and a judge agreed, dropping the charges in December 2012. Then the university fired Hoffner anyway, and he lodged a formal complaint against them, taking the head coaching job at conference rival Minot State in the interim. Then in 2014, an arbitrator ruled in Hoffner's favor, citing irregularities in the school's investigation (interviews weren't done under oath or recorded, then the investigator destroyed the notes after the charges were dropped). Soon after, Minnesota State gave Hoffner his job back, and he left Minot State without coaching a single game for the team.
• University of Mississippi (known as Ole Miss) head football coach Hugh Freeze's tenure at that school came to an abrupt end in 2017 after a series of investigations. First was the NCAA charging Ole Miss with recruiting violations in early 2016; with the scrutiny intensifying when offensive tackle Laremy Tunsil - shortly before he was taken by the Miami Dolphins in the 2016 NFL Draft - admitted to taking money from an assistant. After announcing (following a 2016 season that saw the Rebels suffer a losing season for the first time under Freeze) that Ole Miss would voluntarily remove themselves from bowl consideration in the 2017 season, the same day the NCAA announced eight additional violations by Ole Miss; including charging Freeze with not properly monitoring his assistants. This was followed in July 2017 by Freeze's predecessor, Houston Nutt, filing a defamation suit against Ole Miss accusing the school and Freeze of falsely claiming the violations were under Nutt's watch, with Nutt's lawyers filing a Freedom of Information Act request for calls made on Freeze's university-issued cell phone. In the process, it was discovered that Freeze had called a number associated with an escort service. Freeze, when confronted, tried to claim it was a wrong number before he was confronted with several other instances of similar calls dating to his 2011 arrival; leading to a "resign or be fired" ultimatum due to the contact with the escort service violating the morals clause in Freeze's contract^note additionally, Freeze had been outspoken about his Christian faith and regularly spoke in churches, causing the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville to note that "...he faced scrutiny and criticism not only as a rising star in the coaching world, but as a high profile evangelical Christian, too,". Freeze eventually fell on his sword^note in 2019; among the punishments issued by the NCAA included the 27 wins from every season Freeze coached at Ole Miss except for 2015 being vacated; but soon rebounded by taking the head coaching job at Liberty University starting in 2019, remaining there until 2022, when Freeze signed a contract to become the Auburn Tigers head coach starting in 2023.
• Mel Tucker was fired from his head coaching job at Michigan State University following an investigation into claims of sexually inappropriate behavior toward Brenda Tracy, a prominent rape survivor who had made a career of educating athletes about sexual violence... and whom Tucker had hired to speak to his team on multiple occasions.
• Following allegations of hazing amongst the Northwestern University football team, Pat Fitzgerald was suspended, then fired as head coach in July 2023.

American Football (Professional)

• Former Carolina Panthers defensive end Frank Alexander had this happen to him multiple times, to the point of ruining his entire NFL career in the process, due to his affinity with marijuana (which was considered an illegal substance at the time). After showing promise with the Panthers in his first two seasons in the NFL, he wound up getting a rather typical four-game suspension on May 5, 2014, for violating the league's substance abuse policy due to his use of marijuana. While this normally wouldn't be enough to list him here, the problem was that when he was close to returning to play that season, he ended up getting a 10-game suspension on October 1 due to another violation of their substance abuse policy with marijuana. While he did play by the end of the season, playing his final NFL game at the end of the 2014 regular season, this isn't where his story ends. After suffering an Achilles tendon injury in the Panthers' second preseason game of their 2015 season and facing an unusual waiver/injury reserve situation during the season, he ended up getting suspended for a third time on November 24, this time for the rest of the 2015 season, including Super Bowl 50, due to his marijuana usage continuing to violate the league's substance abuse policy. He was waived by the Panthers sometime after their Super Bowl run concluded, which left him with no choice other than to play with the BC Lions in the Canadian Football League in 2017 before trying to revive his career by playing for the Dallas Renegades under Vince McMahon's second attempt at the XFL in 2020, though his time with them was cut short due to the COVID-19 Pandemic and he has yet to play the sport professionally again since then.
• New York Jets' former head strength and conditioning coach Sal Alosi was suspended indefinitely for his actions in a game against the Miami Dolphins. Alosi had tripped Dolphins cornerback Nolan Carroll, who was running down the sideline during a punt return. He was handed his suspension by the Jets two days later after the team found out he instructed inactive Jets players to line up on the sideline to potentially impede opposing players, with the team's general manager, Mike Tannenbaum, confirming that Alosi was initially not truthful with how the incident occurred in the first place. It was also later reported in 2015 that during that same season, Alosi got in a fistfight with Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis and that a female chiropractor claimed Alosi verbally abused and humiliated her, getting angry for petty issues like towels and water. Alosi was also fined $25,000 before resigning from the team at the end of January 2011, with the NFL subsequently fining the Jets $100,000 for Alosi's earlier actions. He has since taken on jobs at the college level, including Bryant University, UCLA, and UConn.
• Former Carolina Panthers defensive back Rashard Anderson had an adequate enough start to his career as a former first round pick, to the point of finishing in second place for most fumble return yards in 2001 behind only Brian Urlacher. However, things quickly ended when the NFL suspended him from the 2002 season for violating the substance abuse policy that May. However, it was later extended into the 2003 season as well after he failed to meet the necessary requirements to be reinstated in the league. This eventually led to Anderson getting cut from the team; outside of a failed attempt to join the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League in 2005, he never played football again. He retired from the sport and eventually died of pancreatic cancer on July 13, 2022, at 45.
• On August 15, 2022, two days after his first preseason game, rookie punter Matt Araiza was named as a suspect in a gang rape of a 17-year-old girl. After much public outcry, the Buffalo Bills cut him. While prosecutors later cleared Araiza of the charges, determining that he was not present at the attack, he has yet to play a regular season game.
• Running back Le'Veon Bell had a very tumultuous exit with the Pittsburgh Steelers, to put it mildly. Despite leading the NFL in rushing attempts during the 2017 season and being a key member of the team at the time (rated in the Top 5 of the entire league before entering the 2018 season), Bell held disdain towards the Steelers for franchise tagging him during the season, to the point where he openly admitted that he would consider either sitting out the entire 2018 season or just retire completely. Bell felt that he should have earned more than just that value by comparison, considering he was a top-tier player at the time. Despite Bell's warning to the Steelers, they still tagged him, which was worth $14.5 million to him that season, and he ended up keeping his word that he would not play for them at all that season, to the point of not even bothering to keep contact with the team after contract negotiations stalled on July 16 that year. After expecting a more permanent deal to be in place by the first few weeks of the season, he ultimately failed to sign the final deal by the NFL's November 13 deadline, which made him completely ineligible to play for the rest of the season onward. This led to further shenanigans with the team that season, to the point where UrinatingTree gained a Colbert Bump online for covering the team that season through his "Days of Our Steelers" series. This resulted in Bell signing a 4-year, $52 million deal ($35 million guaranteed) with the New York Jets in 2019, making him the second-highest-paid running back in the NFL at the time. However, after looking like he was back to his old self in his first season with the Jets, he would bounce around to four different teams in a two-year period and hasn't played since 2021.
• Former Jacksonville Jaguars wide receiver Justin Blackmon was cut in 2014 after spending two seasons with the team. Before playing a single game in Jacksonville, Blackmon was arrested in Stillwater, Oklahoma due to him driving under the influence of alcohol. Despite that incident, he was allowed to play his entire 2012 rookie season without any further issues at hand due to his sentence being reduced to a mere underage alcohol possession problem, with Blackmon also leading the rookies that season with 64 receptions and 865 receiving yards, including a rookie record-high 81-yard touchdown reception against the Houston Texans. However, the DUI from the previous season eventually caught up with him the following season, as he received a four-game suspension for it to start out the 2013 season. Then after four more games he played following the suspension, Blackmon was suspended on an indefinite basis during the Jags' bye week due to another violation relating to the NFL's substance abuse policy. Unfortunately for Blackmon, while he would have been eligible to reapply for 2014 at the earliest, he continued to have drug problems afterward, including an arrest in July 2014 at Edmond, Oklahoma for possessing marijuana and another DUI arrest in December 2015 that led to a year in prison that was reduced to a year of probation instead. Despite those problems at hand and claims that he would not be playing for Jacksonville again, the Jaguars did not officially release Blackmon from their suspended list of players, causing him to miss out on playing for the Toronto Argonauts in the Canadian Football League in the 2015 season, effectively ending his once-promising career.
• Former Indianapolis Colts wide receiver LaVon Brazill may have been a rare lucky individual to avoid a season-long suspension, but that didn't mean he didn't get one of these and end his otherwise young NFL career with this in the process regardless. Brazill had already been affected by the NFL's substance abuse policy during his second season with the Colts, meaning he was already on thin ice with the league. Unfortunately for him and the Colts, he violated the policy again on July 3, 2014. Not only did the league enforce his banning for the entirety of the 2014 season, but the Colts also waived him eight days later. Indy chose not to re-sign Brazill after his 10-game suspension, forcing him to play for the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League in 2014 and the Orlando Predators in the arena leagues before his retirement after 2016.
• Josh Brent's career came to an end when he was arrested in December 2012 following a drunk driving accident that killed his Dallas Cowboys teammate Jerry Brown. He was sentenced to six months in prison for vehicular manslaughter and an additional 10 years probation in 2013.
• Antonio Brown went through two of these in as many weeks early in the 2019 NFL season. Once a Pro Bowler and prolific wide receiver with the Pittsburgh Steelers, he was sign-and-traded by the Oakland Raiders for a third and fifth round pick in that year's draft, but a number of off-the-field incidents and altercations meant that they released him before he'd even played a game, mere hours before his 2019 salary would've been guaranteed. He then migrated to the New England Patriots, where he played a grand total of one game — and scored a grand total of one touchdown — before allegations of sexual misconduct cut his time short there as well. However, he was later signed to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2020 and subsequently won Super Bowl LV with Tom Brady (who left the Patriots himself after their 2019 season ended) and the rest of the team. He was then kicked off the Buccaneers in early 2022 in one more of these after he abruptly walked off the field with his jersey and pads off during a game against the New York Jets. Despite this, he has remained in the public eye for his continued behavioral issues, including uploading a pornographic video of himself to his Instagram. Brown would later become owner of the National Arena League's Albany Empire by pushing out the previous owners. To say it was a disaster would be an understatement. AB did not pay players or coaches their salaries, which alienated them into quitting the team. Brown also openly trashed the team and league on their official social media as well. Eventually, due to Brown's failure to pay his fees for the league, the team was booted from the league in May 2023. In the four weeks of Brown's ownership, The Empire went from back-to-back league champions to being kicked out.
• On September 29, 2019, Oakland Raiders linebacker (and intended team captain) Vontaze Burfict lowered his head to make helmet-to-helmet contact with Indianapolis Colts tight end Jack Doyle during the second quarter of their Week 4 match against each other. While the Raiders ultimately won that match with a 31-24 final score, Burfict ended up not only being ejected for that clear hit on Doyle but also was suspended for the rest of the Raiders' final season in Oakland by the NFL going forward. Burfict tried to appeal his suspension, but not only was it obviously denied, it was also revealed that another illegal hit was made on a different Colts player in running back Nyheim Hines earlier on, though it wasn't called that at the time. While Burfict has been cleared to play and has stated he wanted to return to the NFL properly, he has yet to do so as of the end of the 2022 season. As for Jack Doyle, he played well enough for a second Pro Bowl appearance in 2019 before ultimately retiring from the sport in 2021.
• On December 10, 1968, during a game with key playoff implications between the Los Angeles Rams and Chicago Bears, all six of the game's key officials (back judge Adrian Burke, umpire Joe Connell, field judge George Ellis, line judge Jack Fette, referee Norm Schachter, and head linesman Burl Toler) somehow lost track of downs near the end of the game. It related to the Rams being penalized for offensive holding, which would have cost them 15 years from the foul spot in question, yet Schachter and the other individuals involved did not let the Rams replay the down. This first down penalty that should have nullified an incomplete pass play instead led to the Rams receiving a second down play immediately afterward, which led to the Rams losing the ball in what the referees thought was already a completed fourth down play instead of starting the fourth down play where they were at their own 47-yard line with 5 seconds. This controversially led to the Bears winning 17-16 over the Rams, thus officially eliminating them from playoff contention that night; the Bears ultimately failed to make it to the playoffs anyway. But this led to commissioner Pete Rozelle barring the crew from any further officiating that season, which included the entirety of the 1968 NFL Playoffs and the Super Bowl.
• In November 2009, New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress accidentally shot himself in the thigh at a New York nightclub. In New York, concealed carry without a license is a felony, and he accepted a 2-year prison term for criminal possession and reckless endangerment. The Giants suspended and subsequently cut him, but not before a fight with the NFL Players' Association over a $1 million bonus the team owed him (an arbitrator ruled that he would be paid in full).
• Rae Carruth's NFL career was effectively ended after the Carolina Panthers cut him in 1999 and the NFL subsequently suspended him indefinitely for being culpable in the death of his girlfriend and the attempted murder of his son. (He paid an associate of his to shoot his eight-month-pregnant girlfriend Cherica Adams because Carruth didn’t want her to have the baby. While Adams later died in the hospital, her son was delivered in an emergency C-section and survived, albeit with cerebral palsy and brain damage due to a 70-minute lack of oxygen before his birth.) It was permanently ended after he was found guilty in 2001 and was ordered to serve an 18-24-year prison term. Carruth was released in 2018...at which point he tried to sue for custody of the son he attempted to kill.
• In 1988, running back Tony Collins went from a Super Bowl contending team and a Pro Bowl member to being suspended from an Indianapolis Colts team that was looking to return to the playoffs due to a long-time addiction to painkillers that lasted for several seasons with New England. Collins' abuse of painkillers was so great that the NFL had to suspend him for a whole year. While he ultimately returned to the NFL, he never officially played for the Colts, instead playing his final NFL season with Miami in 1990, which unfortunately led to him being addicted to cocaine after his season with the Dolphins concluded. He then played three more seasons in the Arena Football League in the early 1990s between the Orlando Predators, the Cincinnati Rockers, and the Miami Hooters (yes, they were named after that Hooters that you're thinking of) before retiring from football altogether in 1993.
• Late in October 2018, Hugo Cruz became the first-ever person to lose an officiating job in the NFL mid-season, largely thanks to failing to whistle a false start penalty on the Los Angeles Chargers, during what would be a scoring play against the Cleveland Browns.
• Then San Francisco 49ers' team owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. was suspended for being involved with a political gambling scandal. In 1998, former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards was involved in a few bribes with several people, one of which was DeBartolo Jr. DeBartolo Jr. admitted to paying Edwards a $400,000 bribe for the purpose of buying a riverboat casino license in Louisiana and later was convicted for not reporting the extortion when it happened. DeBartolo Jr. received a $1,000,000 fine and two years of probation in relation to his part in the political corruption case, as well as a suspension from the San Francisco 49ers' entire 1999 season. While he was willing to come back to work with the team again for their 2000 season, he ended up ceding control of his franchise to his younger sister, Denise DeBartolo York, and eventually received a Presidential pardon for his role in the corruption scandal by President Donald Trump in February 2020.
• Deflategate, from the 2014 AFC Championship Game between the Indianapolis Colts and New England Patriots left controversial notes regarding how footballs should be handled properly and how those that were involved with it got affected in varying ways. Despite how much of a blowout the game was in the Patriots' favor (or rather, because of it in some people's eyes), it became a scandal that overshadowed the team's success throughout the season (including their near-improbable Super Bowl win over the Seattle Seahawks) that the NFL had to oversee, which many believe was an attempt to make up for their poor handling of several high profile domestic violence cases the previous year. The main ball handlers for the Patriots, John Jastremski, and game day attendant Jim McNally were both indefinitely suspended from the team for four months in 2015. Even then, their punishments still continued to an extent after returning to the Patriots properly, with Jastremski being prohibited from handling the team's footballs himself and McNally being barred from being a locker room attendant for officials or for handling equipment himself. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was also facing a suspension himself for the 2015 season, but the U.S. District Court overturned it and allowed Brady to play for the entire 2015 season; a later U.S. Court of Appeals case after the Patriots' season ended then led to Brady being suspended for the first four games of 2016 instead, which the Patriots managed to work around just fine in that period of time themselves, ultimately winning their Super Bowl. As for the rest of the team, they were fined $1 million for the incident, as well as docked a 2016 first round pick and 2017 fourth round pick before the NFL finally implemented rule changes preventing another Deflategate incident from occurring ever again in the future.
• On the day before the 1946 NFL Championship Game began, two New York Giants players — quarterback Frank Filchock and running back Merle Hapes — had allegedly taken bribes each worth up to $2,500 from bookmaker and gambler Alvin J. Paris in order to fix the NFL's championship match that year in favor of the Chicago Bears (who were favored to win by 7-10 points). After it was announced on the radio that a fix was trying to be made against the Giants, New York City Mayor William O'Dwyer had NFL Commissioner Bert Bell, Giants owner Tim Mara, and New York City police Commissioner Arthur Wallander meet with each other about the fix. The mayor had met with Filchock and Hapes at the Gracie Mansion (though Filchock denied the meeting), with Hapes admitting he was offered a bribe while Filchock denied being offered a bribe at the time. On the day of the championship match, Manhattan District Attorney Frank S. Hogan had caught and subsequently arrested Paris on federal wiretaps in relation to the fix (later admitting the fix to the police). Bell allowed Filchock to play due to a lack of evidence against him at the time, but not Hapes due to his admittance to the scandal at hand. While it was reported that Filchock had performed as hard as he had in the time he played in that match (to the point of suffering a broken nose injury during the game), the Giants ultimately lost the championship match in a 24-14 match due to 10 points being scored by the Bears in the fourth quarter; that point difference turned out to be the precise betting line for gamblers where they neither won nor lost on their bets. In a trial after the game, Filchock admitted to being involved at the time after all, though he did not take Paris' offer, while Paris admitted to everything for the second trial. That led to both Filchock and Hapes being permanently banned from the NFL at that time, with both of them resorting to playing football in Canada (albeit in amateur leagues predating the Canadian Football League via the Ontario Rugby Football Union and the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union at the time) during the banning. However, both of their bans were eventually lifted, with Filchock being able to play in the NFL again in 1950 through the Baltimore Colts (no relation to the modern rendition that eventually became the Indianapolis Colts) and Hapes being reinstated by the NFL in 1954. However, by that time, both players were nearing their forties and couldn't play the sport for much longer, with them gaining more favor in Canada as players anyway and ultimately retiring in Canada instead.
• The NFL's first-ever suspension was intended to be a lifetime ban from the league entirely. However, the unintended consequences of it led to the person in question not only being banned for only one year instead but also inadvertently led to the deaths of two different teams in the NFL and a controversial championship win as well! Art Folz, quarterback of the Chicago Cardinals, hired a bunch of football players from the local Englewood High School to play a part in representing the Cardinals' opponents, the Milwaukee Badgers, for a December 10, 1925 match. As expected, the Cardinals crushed the Badgers (with high school players included) in a 58-0 rout that controversially led the Cardinals into holding the best record of the NFL (and by extension, would consider them champions) at the time. After the game, Folz was initially banned for life from the NFL, only to then get reinstated anyway a year later due to a rivaling football league showing up at the time (though Folz ultimately never bothered playing another game again). Cardinals owner Chris O'Brien was fined $1,000 despite not knowing what had happened, the win the Cardinals had was supposed to be stricken from their record that season (though it never was), the Milwaukee Badgers' owner was forced to sell his team to someone else (which led to them eventually folding themselves after their 1926 season ended), a game that the Pottsville Maroons had against the University of Notre Dame of all teams had the NFL force the disqualification of them that season despite the Cardinals having a worse situation going down on their end (and later ended with the Maroons being dissolved in 1929), and the Cardinals were controversially deemed the champions of the 1925 season and supposedly were cursed under that situation in the process of it all despite later winning the NFL championship under more legitimate means in 1947.
• Former linebacker Jerrell Freeman saw a somewhat unusual instance of this during his time with the Chicago Bears. After first signing a three-year deal worth $12 million to play with the Bears, he faced a four-game suspension on November 21, 2016, due to him violating the NFL's performance-enhancing drug program. That on its own is not unusual to see. However, his second and final season with not just the Bears, but with the NFL in general led to some weird things happening along the way. After facing a Week 1 injury in the 2017 season due to both having a concussion and sustaining a pectoral injury, it was announced on October 30 that year that he was suspended for an extra 10 games for violating the NFL's drug policies a second time in a row. Once that happened, Freeman admitted his own playing career might very well be in jeopardy due to sustaining both a head injury and memory loss, potentially in relation to his Week 1 game against the Atlanta Falcons that year. It later turned out to be correct, as he ultimately retired from the sport completely on May 2, 2018, forgoing the final year of his contract with Chicago. Despite that retirement announcement, the NFL still sought to give him a suspension that lasted the entirety of 32 games (equivalent to two 16-game regular seasons that the NFL had up until the end of their 2020 season) due to him apparently violating the league's drug policies for a third time in a row despite Freeman already being retired before the NFL stepped in with their newest drug suspension ruling.
• In a somewhat weird case of this, New England Patriots wide receiver Terry Glenn lost what was ultimately most of his final season with the Patriots in 2001 due to multiple problems he had with both himself and the team. Before training camp began, he was arrested for domestic assault towards the mother of his son sometime in May 2001 and was dismissed from the team's June mini-camp in the hopes that he would straighten his personal life out. However, by the time their training camp period officially began, he had already been suspended for the first four games of the 2001 season for violating the NFL's substance abuse policy by missing the team's mandatory drug test. He then left training camp (debatably under a pay dispute), forcing the team's hand in sending his agent a letter giving him five days to return or risk additional suspension, which Glenn decided to ignore. He was ultimately placed on the reserve list under an initial season-long suspension. After missing the first four games of the season, Glenn did play for the Patriots for four games in the season, including a starting spot on one of them and even catching the first touchdown pass in Tom Brady's historic, legendary career. However, Glenn's personal problems ultimately left him being declared inactive for seven games before being suspended for the rest of the season, including their Super Bowl run. And to top it all off, despite being credited as a member of the Patriots' Super Bowl team, he never received a ring. While he would join the Green Bay Packers in 2002 and the Dallas Cowboys for the rest of his career from 2003 until 2006, he could never get his act together in the end, with his life tragically ending on November 20, 2017, at 43 years old through a one-vehicle car accident that injured his fiancee.
• On September 22, 1996, Atlanta Falcons quarterback Jeff George got involved in a heated argument with the team's head coach, June Jones, that was picked up on national TV for all of the media to see upfront. This had occurred while the Falcons were losing their third game in a row to start that season out 0-3 after making it to the playoffs the previous season. The following day, the Falcons confirmed they had suspended George for the rest of the season. The Falcons ultimately finished their season with a disappointing 3-13 record, fired Jones, and let George go to Oakland not long afterward.
• Journeyman wide receiver Josh "Flash" Gordon held quite the insane history with these throughout his career in the NFL. After originally having a drug suspension lasting only two games total in his second season in 2013 (which earned him Pro Bowl and First-team All-Pro honors that year), he was originally given a season-long suspension in 2014 after admitting to driving while impaired in Raleigh on July 5, 2014. However, Gordon was the only other player that season to see their original season-long suspension get reduced to a 10-game long suspension instead (though he ultimately was suspended for 11 games that year due to a different violation of Browns team rules). Normally, just one season-long suspension wouldn't be enough to talk about here, but 2014 turned out to only be the beginning of Gordon's tumultuous alcohol and drug issues while with the NFL. He then faced another season-long suspension in 2015 due to his prior case resulting in a guilty plea, which then lasted into not just the 2016 season, but the majority of 2017 also, only returning late into that season via conditional means. It reached a breaking point with Cleveland in 2018 when after a Week 1 tie to start the season, the Browns traded him and a seventh-round pick to the New England Patriots for a 2019 fifth-round pick later that September. Despite performing well enough for the majority of that season with New England, he still wanted to leave the NFL to focus on his mental health, which risked another long-term ban for violating the terms of his conditional reinstatement from earlier. However, not only did he receive his Super Bowl honors that season due to his earlier work despite not even playing, he was also able to return in 2019 after completing his own personal mental health goals that year. Despite that, he was still waived on Halloween that year due to an injury he had, though he was quickly picked up by the Seattle Seahawks, where he played five games with them before yet another indefinite suspension via substance abuse on December 16, 2019, which extended into the entirety of 2020! It took him having a brief stint with the newly-formed Fan Controlled Football League through the FCF Zappers for a team like the Kansas City Chiefs to give him a Last-Second Chance of sorts with the NFL, though he was later waived by them after their 2021 season ended and had a very brief stint with the Tennessee Titans the following season. As of this edit, he's playing with the Seattle Sea Dragons of Dwayne Johnson's revived XFL for 2023, though it remains to be seen if he'll see another shot at the NFL afterward.
• While defensive end Greg Hardy was still playing with the Panthers, Hardy was arrested on May 13, 2014, for assaulting and threatening his ex-girlfriend Nicole Holder by throwing her into furniture and strangling her. Despite the severity of the incident, Hardy was sentenced to 18 months of probation that included a 60-day suspended sentence due in part to the victim failing to appear in court to testify, and the two parties supposedly reaching a civil statement. Despite that, the Panthers were initially allowing Hardy to play before being overruled by Commissioner Roger Goodell after a week of action due to his domestic violence case. Even after initially giving Hardy a franchise tag in 2014, Panthers owner Jerry Richardson decided to let him go in spite of the players and coaches wanting to give him another chance with the team. This led to the Dallas Cowboys wanting to sign him for the purpose of finding a difference-maker on the right side of their defensive end woes, despite the criticism they would receive for even signing him. This later led to the NFL wanting to further suspend Hardy for an additional 10 games with the Cowboys after missing most of the Panthers' 2014 season, though they ultimately reduced it to four games in order to avoid possible legal action on Hardy's part. While he did show promise with the Cowboys early on once his suspension ended, continued problems with production and attitude led to him being removed from the Cowboys (and by extension, the NFL) once the 2015 season concluded. After participating in The Spring League in 2017 and then with the Richmond Roughriders of the American Arena League in 2018, Hardy ultimately left the sport of football behind him in order to pursue an MMA career, later joining the UFC in 2018 and even doing professional boxing matches in 2022.
• Carlton Haselrig had an interesting NFL career; despite never playing football either in high school or in college, opting to do wrestling in both Johnstown High School and the Division II University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown, he was still drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 12th round of the 1989 draft. Despite looking like a longshot to do just about anything for the NFL, his wrestling days proved to be very advantageous for the Steelers at that position, leaving him to be a very useful offensive guard during his time there. So much so, in fact, that he ended up earning a Pro Bowl honor in 1992 due to his help in getting the Steelers the AFC Central Division title that year, as well as three playoff appearances during his time in Pittsburgh. However, despite his success early on, he had problems with drugs and was caught multiple times with some sort of substance abuse problem during his time with Pittsburgh, which led to him not even getting a chance to play at all in 1994. Still, the New York Jets were more than willing to give Haselrig a second chance in the NFL in 1995, as they felt some of his good work with Pittsburgh was still inside of him as a running back instead. Unfortunately for the Jets, not only did their gamble lead to them having a 3-13 season that year, but it also backfired badly for Haselrig with him not only having an arrest warrant for drunk driving and having an unregistered firearm at his disposal on November 27, but was also suspended for the entirety of the 1996 season in the process. This led to Haselrig not only retiring early from the sport in 1995 but eventually led to him having a brief career in MMA fighting over a decade later, finishing his return to what he did best with a 3-2 record for professional MMA fighting. He later died on July 22, 2020, due to liver disease, but not before being honored through a "Carlton Haselrig Day" on January 19, 2016, for his work both in fighting and professional football with the Steelers.
• On June 27, 2013, less than two hours after the arrest of New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez on suspicion of murdering former semi-pro football player Odin Lloyd, the Patriots cut their relations with the former star and made moves to recoup the remainder of his contract salary. Soon after, the Patriots also organized a limited pro shop exchange where any Hernandez jersey could be exchanged for another player's replica shirt for no charge, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame removed a popular picture of him from a display. He was subsequently convicted of the murder, and after being acquitted on an unrelated murder charge, he hanged himself in prison in April 2017.
• On April 17, 1963, it was discovered that two players on two different teams had been involved with betting on NFL games and associating themselves with gamblers at the time. Both future Hall of Famers Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers and Alex Karras of the Detroit Lions (a.k.a. Mongo from Blazing Saddles) were suspended for the entire season due to their gambling problems at the time, with Karras placing at least a half-dozen bets ranging from $50 to $100 each and Hornung betting up to $500 of his own money in some games. Both Hornung and Karras admitted to their faults they made with gambling and quit their habits upon their return.
• The Kansas City Chiefs cut running back Kareem Hunt, who'd been the NFL's leading rusher as a rookie the previous year, at the tail end of November 2018 after TMZ published footage of him assaulting a woman earlier that February. Despite this, he was signed by the Cleveland Browns the following season, albeit after serving an eight-game suspension.
• Sam Hurd's NFL career was ended after he pled guilty in 2013 and was sentenced to 15 years for attempting to distribute large amounts of cocaine and marijuana during the 2011 season.
• Former offensive guard Richie Incognito, experienced this in his final season with the Miami Dolphins in 2013 due to a bullying scandal regarding offensive tackle Jonathan Martin. The targeted attacks against Martin by Incognito began back in Martin's rookie season in 2012, with reports of Incognito sending him and his family numerous texts and voicemails threatening them, with the most egregious exchanges coming in April 2013 when he called Martin a "half-nigger piece of shit" and threats to harm both him and his mother. Eventually, Martin quit the team in November. Once the Dolphins heard the exchanges that Incognito had with Martin, he was suspended for the second half of the Dolphins' season and into the next year. Incognito later experienced a Career Resurrection with his second stint with the Buffalo Bills (having previously played for the Bills in 2009), with him not just returning to the Pro Bowl in each of his seasons, but also helped end Buffalo's 17-year-long playoff drought in 2017. Incognito initially retired in 2018, but he later returned to play in the NFL with the Raiders before retiring for good in 2022. As for Martin, he unfortunately did not experience similar success himself afterward, with him playing in one more season with San Francisco in 2014 before a severe back injury while with the Carolina Panthers in 2015 caused an early retirement for him. Even worse than that, his mental health struggles and suicide attempts led to him posting a threatening Instagram post claiming he'd kill suicide or shoot up his former high school in California, Harvard-Westlake School, before voluntarily checking himself into a mental hospital without doing any damage. Martin was ultimately not charged, and he has been an advocate for mental health in the sport.
• NFL player Janoris Jenkins was cut from the New York Giants in December 2019 after he directed an offensive remark at a fan on Twitter when that fan asked Jenkins why the stats he was tweeting were not translating to wins for the team. In addition to the remark, the team was also upset that he had made the tweet when he was supposed to be participating in practice. Despite this, he would soon be signed by the New Orleans Saints.^note Which led to jokes and even serious speculation from people that Jenkins did this on purpose. The Giants have been perennial doormats since the early 2010s and are notorious for treating their players like garbage, while the Saints have a much better reputation in league circles and before the retirements of quarterback Drew Brees (in 2021) and head coach Sean Payton (in 2022) were guaranteed a playoff berth thanks to their high powered offense and playing in a weak division.
• The notoriously flamboyant Chad Johnson, formerly known as Chad Ochocinco, was released by the Miami Dolphins in 2012 after he was arrested following a fight with his wife Evelyn Lozada. On top of effectively ending his NFL career (Johnson has not played in the league since), this had the side effect of shelving Ev and Ocho — a VH1 spinoff of Basketball Wives that they had already filmed — before it would have come to air a month later, as well as their marriage.
• Terry "Tank" Johnson's entire (early) career was mired in legal issues that ultimately affected his entire career trajectory with the Chicago Bears, to the point that he had to appear in circuit court to get permission to play in Super Bowl XLI because of him violating gun charges in the state of Illinois, among other issues at the time. However, the biggest issues that caused his 8-game suspension and removal from the Bears afterward came after that Super Bowl appearance, which included violating a probation in February 2007 that was given to him for a misdemeanor gun charge back in 2005 (with his reason claiming that since he was a resident of the state of Arizona instead of Illinois, he did not have to abide by gun registration laws in Illinois), pleading guilty to a misdemeanor weapons charge in April (which caused him to have an eight-game suspension in the first place, joining Chris Henry and Adam "Pacman" Jones as the third player that season to be suspended for at least a half-season of time), and speeding in Gilbert, Arizona with mild alcohol intoxication involved in June, with the last incident resulting in him being cut from the team three days after the news broke. Tank was given a second chance with the Dallas Cowboys by the start of the season, but it turned out he struggled to fit in with Dallas' defensive schemes. While Johnson had no legal problems in Dallas, they decided that he should be let go of by 2009, with him playing for the Cincinnati Bengals going forward in his career. While he showed the same promise with Cincinnati that he did back in Chicago at first, a right knee injury in 2010 ultimately caused him to miss the rest of the season and led to an early retirement.
• During the 2007 NBA All-Star Weekend in Las Vegas, Nevada, Tennessee Titans cornerback Adam "Pacman" Jones got involved in an altercation at the Minxx local strip club. Despite "making it rain" hundreds of $1 bills for the stripper with fellow patrons Nelly and Richard Rich, Jones was enraged at the stripper taking his money without his permission, which led to an altercation where he ended up grabbing the stripper's hair and slammed her head on the stage, as well as allegedly threatening a security guard's life. Considering not just the high-profile nature of the NBA All-Star Weekend, combined with the repeated legal issues he had throughout his time with Tennessee, it was easy to see why not only did Commissioner Roger Goodell give him a season-long suspension for the entire season, but the Titans also let him go. His legal troubles have largely overshadowed his on-field performance, though after signing with the Cincinnati Bengals he (mostly) stayed out of trouble and was able to carve out a pretty respectable career before retiring in 2019.
• San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and racial inequality. The protests received highly polarized reactions, with some praising him for his opposition stand against racism and others denouncing the protests. Kaepernick became a free agent after the season and remained unsigned, which numerous analysts and observers have attributed to political reasons. In November 2017, he filed a grievance against the NFL and its owners, accusing them of colluding to keep him out of the league. Kaepernick withdrew the grievance in February 2019 after reaching a confidential settlement with the NFL. He would eventually become the face of Nike's new "Just Do It" campaign in 2018 and was Vindicated by History when the 2020 deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in police incidents sparked massive nationwide protests similar to those he led. Furthermore, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell publicly apologized for not supporting the kneeling athletes, but as of yet, Kaepernick still has not signed for another professional football team for reasons that are very complicated.^note During the 2015 and 2016 seasons, Kaepernick had regressed significantly and was prone to injuries during his last two seasons, winning a total of three games and putting up some of the worst QB Ratings and Completion Percentages in the league during the period. He also lost his starting job to Blaine Gabbert at two points before winning it back. During the 2017 offseason, he had asked teams to guarantee him a starting position with a competitive contract of ~$20 million and turned down offers from other leagues that couldn't match his price; though Gabbert secured spots on several teams after he was cut, none of his annual salaries went to even a tenth of that. While Kaepernick has claimed he still wants to play as recently as 2020, the combination of his performance decline, past contract demands, and the fact he has not played a single game of high-level football since 2016 seems to have caused NFL teams to move on.
• Chad Kelly has had a troubled career, to say the least. Being the nephew of Hall of Fame QB Jim Kelly, this gave him a major case of Small Name, Big Ego, as he would frequently cause trouble off the field, such as once starting a fight at his younger brother Casey's high school football game. These disciplinary issues would tank his draft value, as he was Picked Last by the Denver Broncos in the 2017 draft. One year later, he was cut by the Broncos following a bizarre incident where he drunkenly entered a home following a Halloween party hosted by teammate Von Miller. The woman who lived there would end up chasing him out by beating him with a vacuum cleaner tube. He would have a brief stint with the Indianapolis Colts but was soon out of the league. His story does have a happy ending, though. In 2022, he would lead the Canadian Football League's Toronto Argonauts to a Grey Cup championship.
• Despite winning an improbable Super Bowl over the clear-cut favorites in Tom Brady & Bill Belichick's New England Patriots, Mychal Kendricks still demanded a trade out of Philadelphia afterward due to playing time concerns. While he wasn't traded out of Philadelphia, the defending champion Eagles did cut him on May 22, 2018, with Kendricks later signing a one-year deal with the Cleveland Browns on June 5 that same year. However, while he was on their preseason team and looked to get something for the Browns after a winless season in 2017, it was revealed that Kendricks was facing federal charges of insider trading due to allegedly making $1.2 million in extra profits on illegal trades made between 2014 and 2017 while he was with the Eagles. He also allegedly paid a man named Damilare Sonoiki $10,000 and gave him free tickets to Eagles games, which led to him being charged as well. This led to Kendricks being cut by the Browns the day after his arrest on August 30, with him later signing a new one-year deal with the Seattle Seahawks on September 13. While Kendricks was initially allowed to play for the Seahawks, he eventually faced an indefinite suspension on October 2 before getting an eight-game suspension on October 30. Ultimately, he played two more seasons with the Seahawks and got off with a slap on the wrist.
• In 2022, just before their game in Mexico City against the San Francisco 49ers, the Arizona Cardinals fired assistant coach Sean Kugler after he was accused of groping a woman by authorities.
• Dexter Manley was suspended for the final six games of the 1989 season and was ultimately let go by the Washington Redskins in the offseason for his cocaine abuse. Once he was reinstated in the early 1990s, Manley ended up playing for the Phoenix Cardinals and Tampa Bay Buccaneers before a fourth drug suspension on December 12, 1991, forced him to retire from the NFL, though he did play for a few more years in the Canadian Football League before retiring for good in 1994. He then had a series of arrests relating to his drug problems and served two years in prison after his retirement, as well as undergoing brain surgery to treat a colloid cyst in June 2006 that left him with partial memory loss. However, his time with Washington was remembered in a positive manner, as he was considered one of the 90 greatest players in franchise history and was honored in their Ring of Fame.
• Todd Marinovich, nicknamed "Robo QB" for how his father Marv had practically built and bred him to be the same football star he himself had been in the sixties, dealt with drug addiction that ended his pro career before it could truly get off the ground. Drafted 24th overall in the 1991 NFL Draft by the Los Angeles Raiders, his excessive partying and usage of illicit drugs caused the team to cut him after his third failed drug test. He attempted to bounce back in the Canadian and Arena Football Leagues, including an attempted comeback in the NFL, but his continued drug usage, injuries, and weight loss affected his playing skill. Marinovich would retroactively be considered one of the biggest NFL draft busts of all time.
• Charles Martin became the first NFL player to receive a multi-game suspension for on-field conduct when the Chicago Bears hosted his Green Bay Packers in 1986. After Bears quarterback Jim McMahon threw an interception, Martin—who allegedly had a "hit list" of McMahon's and other Bears' numbers printed on a towel he wore during the game—body-slammed the man hard enough on his already injured shoulder that it ended his season. Martin was ejected almost immediately, and suspended for the next two games for what referee Jerry Markbreit called "the most violent act of its day". The Packers would later cut Martin from the team in 1987 after he was implicated in a local bar fight.
• Urban Meyer, who enjoyed success at the college level (though not without controversy) was fired after only thirteen games as the head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars during the 2021 season after reports of a toxic locker room environment and a dictatorial demeanor, as well as former kicker Josh Lambo revealing that Meyer had kicked him and called him names, culminating in one of the most disastrous coaching tenures in NFL history. Since August 2022, Meyer has maintained a steady career as a sports analyst for Fox Sports.
• Cleveland Browns offensive line coach Andy Moeller was fired for allegedly assaulting a woman in his home in September 2015. Moeller originally stayed with the team for two games under his initial suspension period before he agreed with the Browns to part ways on September 27, 2015. He has yet to coach for another team at any level, despite him previously winning a Super Bowl championship with the Baltimore Ravens as an offensive line coach in 2013.
• Chuck Muncie was a promising running back. While he showed his worth with the San Diego Chargers early on, leading the league in rushing touchdowns in 1981 (which was a tied record at the time between him, Earl Campbell in 1979 with the Houston Oilers, and Jim Taylor in 1962 with the Green Bay Packers) and leading the Chargers in games like the Epic in Miami during the 1981 NFL Playoffs, former Saints teammate Don Reese admitted during his time with the New Orleans Saints, he and Muncie used cocaine together, with then-teammate Mike Strachan first selling the substance to them. While Muncie claimed his cocaine usage dropped down since being traded to San Diego, he admitted to having problems with alcohol and marijuana usage after the 1982 season, which led to him doing multiple rehab stints in 1983. After playing a game with the Chargers in 1984, he missed a flight to Seattle allegedly due to his car tires being slashed by vandals, which subsequently led to an initial trade with the Miami Dolphins for a second-round pick. Unfortunately for the Chargers, Muncie tested positive for cocaine usage, and the trade was revoked. Despite entering rehab again afterward for a month, Muncie was suspended for the rest of the season; he was eventually traded to the Minnesota Vikings for a future sixth-round pick once he was approved to play again in 1985. While Muncie played well for the Vikings in his sole preseason game for them, he was suspended for one game after failing a condition that required him to attend two aftercare therapy sessions, which ultimately led to his retirement three days later in order to sort out his personal life. He faced homelessness and 18 months in prison in the late 1980s before turning his life around by working with the Boys & Girls Club of America until his fatal heart attack in 2013.
• In an unusual instance of this, New York Jets cornerback Dimitri Patterson was permanently suspended by the team on August 25, 2014. Why you may ask? He allegedly left the team without contacting the Jets organization about it properly first, even though Patterson claims they were given proper notification by his agent, Drew Rosenhaus. Ultimately, Patterson was waived from the Jets five days later and retired from the NFL not long afterward.
• The Las Vegas Raiders were hit by a series of scandals in 2021:
  • Following an investigation into the Washington Football Team (now the Commanders) for workplace misconduct in October 2021, it was discovered that two-time Raiders head coach Jon Gruden had sent e-mails to former Washington president Bruce Allen containing racist, misogynistic, and homophobic remarks. Gruden subsequently resigned from the team. He also lost his spot in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' Ring of Honor in relation to this incident despite him coaching the team to their first-ever Super Bowl win over his former Raiders team and having the team's career win records at 57 games won for them as head coach.
  • On November 2, 2021, wide receiver Henry Ruggs was speeding down a city street at 156 mph in the middle of the night. He crashed into another car, killing a woman and her dog. Ruggs was released later that day and later accepted a plea deal that would see him serve 3 to 10 years in prison.
  • The following week, cornerback and the Raiders' other 2020 first-round pick Damon Arnette was cut after posting a video on social media of himself brandishing a gun and threatening to kill people. Arnette signed with the Chiefs in January 2022, but he was released after he was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon.
• On February 10, 2021, only a few days after their appearance in Super Bowl LV, the Kansas City Chiefs opted not to renew outside linebackers coach Britt Reid's^note Son of head coach Andy Reid contract due to his involvement in a multi-vehicle accident less than a week earlier.
• On August 7, 1982, Los Angeles Rams linebacker Mike Reilly was involved in a car accident that killed a 17-year-old boy and injured two others. While he ultimately played in the strike-shortened season, he was sentenced to a year in prison, which would be the kiss of death to his pro career.
• In 2014, NFL running back Ray Rice was cut from the Baltimore Ravens and suspended indefinitely after a video of him striking his then-girlfriend (to the point of unconsciousness) in an elevator surfaced. Earlier, Rice had been suspended for 2 games after another video of the same incident merely hinted at him having struck her, which, in itself, brought heavy criticism to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell for the virtual slap on the wrist. The suspension was overturned in court, meaning Rice was eligible to play again, but no team was willing to take him after this controversy; Rice himself has since admitted that his playing career is over.
• Former defensive tackle Darrell Russell was suspended by the Oakland Raiders on January 2, 2002, where he was suspended for the entirety of the 2002 season due to failing a drug test. While this led to him moving to Washington to play with the Redskins in 2003 after missing a season's worth of play, what happened afterward is what makes it more tragic. After initially signing a training camp deal with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for the 2004 season, he was given an indefinite suspension from the NFL for multiple instances of violating the league's drug policies. This eventually led to Russell and his former USC teammate Michael Bastianelli's involvement in an accident on December 15, 2005, when their 2004 Pontiac Grand Prix veered out of control and eventually struck a parked bus in Los Angeles. They were both found unconscious and died later that day.
• On May 20, 1983, Baltimore Colts quarterback Art Schlichter was suspended for the 1983 NFL season for not just betting on NFL games but also betting on other sporting events as well. When the discovery of his gambling problem came to light, it was revealed that Schlichter had gambling debts of up to $150,000 at the time. After he left the Indianapolis Colts in 1985 and failed to make it with the Buffalo Bills in 1986, Schlichter's gambling addiction still caused him problems as an individual, even after finding some playing time with the Canadian Football League in 1988 and the Arena Football League in the early 1990s, to the point where he was eventually given a 10-year prison sentence in 2011 in relation to fraud of over a million dollars.
• Until his death in 2024, O. J. Simpson maintained that ever since the 1994 double murder case he was involved in — and the widely publicized "Trial of the Century" that eventually acquitted him — he had been unable to make an honest living, let alone so much as appear in public, without Fred Goldman, the father of one of his alleged victims, hauling him into court on a hair trigger. The fact that he won the criminal case but lost the subsequent civil case didn't help matters, either. It might have also caused him to receive a 33-year prison sentence for armed robbery but was paroled after nine.
• On the early morning of March 14, 2009, Cleveland Browns wide received Donté Stallworth was driving under the influence of alcohol when he accidentally struck and killed 59-year-old Mario Reyes (who was trying to catch a bus home after finishing his night shift). Stallworth was suspended for the entire season and was let go by the team afterwards. He then bounced around the league before retiring in 2013 and focusing on journalism as a part of his new career path since then.
• In 1990, Super Bowl XXVII was moved from Tempe to Pasadena due to Arizona's refusal to acknowledge Martin Luther King Day as a federal holiday. The state would eventually host Super Bowl XXX after it approved the holiday in a 1992 referendum.
• Michael Vick gained prominence as the starting quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, known for a speed and rushing skill not ordinarily seen in quarterbacks at the time. He played in three Pro Bowls during his time as a Falcon, and in 2006 became the first NFL quarterback to ever run over 1,000 yards in a single season despite missing the playoffs that season. Everyone viewed Vick as a positive role model—that he was the one who'd save the troubled team. Just after the season's end, however, everything changed: it turned out Vick had been running a dogfighting business at his property in Virginia for over five years—just after he'd joined the Falcons—and several months later, he and several others were arrested and charged with numerous counts of animal cruelty. Vick was immediately suspended, and pleaded guilty to all charges just a month afterward, receiving a sentence of 23 months in federal prison. Numerous lawsuits from various animal rights groups caused him to file for bankruptcy in July 2008, and the Falcons released him outright months later. Vick had stints with the Philadelphia Eagles, the New York Jets, and the Pittsburgh Steelers after doing his time, but his past ensured he would never achieve the same popularity he had a decade before. He quietly retired from the NFL in 2017.
• Before officially leaving the Houston Texans in 2022, star quarterback Deshaun Watson faced an ugly exit from Houston due to dozens of allegations and lawsuits from massage therapists that he had sexually abused them while he was in Texas. The problem got so bad that any potential trades that would have gotten Watson out of Houston a year earlier in 2021 (such as deals revolving around the Miami Dolphins) were ultimately canned because of how awful Watson's situation was, thus making Watson's final season with the team a wash. While all criminal charges were dropped, opening the door for him to get traded out of Houston by finding a deal with the Cleveland Browns, he was suspended for 11 games and still faces multiple civil lawsuits. Needless to say, the allegations will continue to dog both him AND the Browns to this day.
• Philadelphia Eagles offensive tackle Bernard Williams was named to the NFL's All-Rookie team in 1994, after starting all 16 games. However, his ultimate undoing came from his repeated marijuana usage, which dated back to his college days at the University of Georgia, following a series of family deaths and the arrest of his aunt. After multiple instances of failed drug tests with the team in what was supposed to be his second season with the team, he was indefinitely suspended on October 23, 1995. Williams never applied for reinstatement, but he did finish his career playing the sport in the Canadian Football League (including a championship win in 2004 with the Toronto Argonauts), as well as some brief stints in Vince McMahon's first XFL attempt with the Memphis Maniax and in the Arena Football League with the Detroit Fury. Amusingly, the Eagles kept Williams on their inactive roster until November 2023, by which point he hadn't played professional football in 17 years.
• On the night before Super Bowl XXIII, Stanley Wilson, the Cincinnati Bengals' leading rusher of the 1988 season and thus an important part of their offense, was found in his hotel room in the midst of a cocaine high. The team had to suspend him from the Super Bowl—and as this was Wilson's third drug offense (which had already cost him three different seasons in 1984 (missing all but one game that year), 1985, and 1987 in relation to said offenses), the NFL had to ban him for life. Many of the players on that team say that the news threw them off their game enough to account for their close loss to the 49ers. The Bengals would not reach the Super Bowl again until 2022, and before that season had not even won a playoff game since 1991—the longest such drought in the league.^note The Detroit Lions, whose last postseason win came in 1992, tied that mark after finishing out of the playoffs thirty years later but made the playoffs in 2023 and advanced to the NFC Championship, ending their streak. As for Wilson, he would drift in and out of rehab before finally being sentenced to 22 years in prison for burglary in 1999, eventually being released from prison once his sentence was completed in 2021.
• Former running back Tim Worley was cut by the Pittsburgh Steelers for missing the league's mandatory drug tests to go to the NBA All-Star Game in Orlando. Normally, a missed drug test or two wouldn't qualify him for this page, but he had already been caught red-handed for using cocaine twice beforehand, which led to him getting a six-game suspension with the Steelers in 1991, and he was already on thin ice with the team after facing a serious decline ever since his rookie season ended. The NFL suspended him for the 1992 season and the Steelers decided to trade Worley to the Chicago Bears for a fifth-round pick in 1993 as a means for Chicago to both improve the Bears' rushing attack with Neal Anderson and help resurrect Worley's own career at the same time. While he started to improve, he missed the team's flight to Detroit, resulting in him being cut. He never played again.

Animal athletes

• A rare non-human example: The Atlanta Blaze, a professional men's field lacrosse team, introduced a Team Pet to open their 2017 season in the form of Siren the Dalmatian. But Siren's first and only appearance was cut short after a Potty Emergency where he went behind one of the goals during the National Anthem. He was retired almost immediately after his debut game—and only two days after he'd first been announced.^note The Blaze, for their part, narrowly lost that game and finished out of the playoffs that season.
• Bodacious was retired from professional bull riding (PBR, PRCA, and BRO) on December 11, 1995, although he competed in a few non-sanctioned events in 1996, by his owner as Bodacious was too violent to be ridden.
• Dancer's Image was stripped of his 1968 Kentucky Derby win when the anti-inflammatory medication phenylbutazone was found during the mandatory post-race urinalysis, with the win instead going to second-place finisher Forward Pass. At the time, Kentucky did not allow the medication on race day; Dancer's Image's handlers had given him the medication six days before the race, believing that it would clear his system by race day.
• In 2019, Maximum Security became the first Kentucky Derby winner to be disqualified in over 50 years, and the first ever to be DQ'd for an in-race incident, after he drifted out of his lane while leading the Derby. He'd gotten close enough to other horses that the judges decided Maximum Security had impeded their progress—close enough, in fact, to nearly cause a spill, some said—and they declared 65-1 longshot Country House the official winner instead.
• In February 2022, Medina Spirit was officially stripped of his 2021 Kentucky Derby win. The mandatory post-race urinalysis found betamethasone, banned in Kentucky on race day but otherwise legal there. His trainer Bob Baffert drew a 90-day suspension from the state; Churchill Downs Inc., owner of the track that hosts the Derby, had already banned him for 2 years from all of its racetracks. By the time this decision was handed down, Medina Spirit had died from unknown causes after a workout.^note A necropsy found no definitive cause of death.

Auto racing

• NASCAR:
  • Jeff Green was fired from Richard Childress Racing after the 2003 Pontiac Excitement 400 when he criticized his then-teammate Kevin Harvick for rear-ending him.
  • Jeremy Mayfield was suspended by NASCAR in 2009 after testing positive for meth (allegedly, as Mayfield has continued to accuse NASCAR of manipulating his drug test results). He would then be involved in a string of burglaries two years later before kicking his habit and starting amateur racing again in 2014.
  • Kurt Busch was suspended right before the 2015 Daytona 500 after domestic violence allegations were made against him by his ex-girlfriend Patricia Driscoll, who alleged that he struck her during the fall 2014 Dover race weekend. NASCAR suspended him while the charges were investigated, as a way of demonstrating their proactive stance on the issue. He was reinstated to the sport four races into the 2015 season, at Phoenix, once it was made clear that there was no evidence to bring charges against him.
  • In 2006, driver Michael Waltrip started his own racing team in the Cup Series, Michael Waltrip Racing. It was a moderately successful team (although it began with a controversy surrounding use of an illegal substance in exhaust manifolds at the 2007 Daytona 500), even getting a couple of wins with Clint Bowyer in 2012, plus Martin Truex Jr. and Brian Vickers in 2013. And then there was the "Spingate" scandal, when the team was caught attempting to manipulate the finish of the 2013 Federated Auto Parts 400, by having Bowyer purposely bring out a caution, in an attempt to get Truex into the Chase. After a review of the incident, NASCAR threw the book at MWR: penalizing all three teams 50 driver and owner points, assessed to their pre-seeding totals. This knocked Truex out of the Chase and gave his spot to Ryan Newman. All three teams were also given a $300,000 fine, their crew chiefs were put on probation for the remainder of the year, and MWR general manager of competition Ty Norris was indefinitely suspended. The next week, Truex's sponsor NAPA Auto Parts decided to terminate their partnership with the team effective at the end of 2013, with two years left on their most recent agreement with the team^note NAPA went down to the Xfinity Series where they partnered with Dale Earnhardt Jr. to sponsor Chase Elliott, funding him through his rookie/championship 2014 season, and continuing to sponsor him when he was pushed up to the Cup Series to replace the retiring Jeff Gordon. This ultimately led to the #56 becoming a part-time team, as well as the dismissal of Truex from MWR. While Truex would have the last laugh and find greater success with Furniture Row Racing including a Cup championship in 2017 (and Joe Gibbs Racing beginning in 2019), MWR never regained the prestige it had pre-Spingate, and the loss of funding caused by NAPA's withdrawal led to the team folding at the end of the 2015 season.
  • A.J. Allmendinger, while driving for Team Penske, was suspended in July 2012 after he tested positive for amphetamines during a drug test just before the Coke Zero 400. On August 1st, he was released from his contract at Penske. This did not end his career, as Allmendinger chose to participate in NASCAR's Road to Recovery program, and at its completion was reinstated by NASCAR that October, making his return in a one-off with Phoenix Racing at Charlotte subbing for Regan Smith (who was subbing for a concussed Dale Earnhardt Jr). He then spent 2013 as a part-time driver with Phoenix Racing and JTG Daugherty Racing in the Sprint Cup Series, a road course ringer for Roger Penske in the Xfinity Series (winning both events he participated in there), and competed in the Indianapolis 500. He became a full-time Cup driver for JTG Daugherty, even picking up his first career Cup win at Watkins Glen.
  • Brian France, former NASCAR chairman and grandson of NASCAR co-founder and driver Bill France, stepped down from his position in August of 2018 after he was arrested on DUI and prescription drug possession charges shortly after that month's race at Watkins Glen in New York. His uncle, Jim, took over his position in 2019 and Brian appears to have left the sport entirely.
  • In April 2020, Kyle Larson was caught saying a racial slur during qualifying for "Monza Madness", a non-official special event on iRacing organized by fellow driver Landon Cassill. It was meant to be private, but the multiple streams of the session hosted by other drivers (with voice chat turned on) unfortunately publicized it. The morning after, Larson took to Twitter to apologize, but the damage was more than done—-he lost most of his sponsors and was indefinitely suspended by his team, Chip Ganassi Racing (who later cut ties with Larson for good), and NASCAR, for which he was forced to attend sensitivity training. A similar incident happened in 2013 with Xfinity Series driver Jeremy Clements, who completed sensitivity training and was reinstated two weeks later. The difference between the incidents was that Clements was driving for his own team in a lower series and Larson was hired by a major team in the Cup series. Sponsors, including engine supplier Chevrolet, began leaving Larson en masse, forcing Ganassi to dump him for the remainder of 2020. Chip Ganassi would replace Larson in the No. 42 with Matt Kenseth when the series resumed on a modified schedule at Darlington that May. As of October 19, 2020, Larson was allowed to return after completing sensitivity training and working with outreach groups, and was signed by Hendrick Motorsports to drive the #5 car for the 2021 season; he ended up having a very strong comeback season, winning ten races en route to taking home the Cup Series championship.
  • Brandon Brown has had a quite bit of difficulty attracting sponsors ever since some anti-Biden fans at one race in 2021 were misheard as saying "Let's go Brandon!" instead of "Fuck Joe Biden!" Unusually for this trope, Brown wasn't really at fault for his situation — and had he kept his mouth shut, people may have felt bad for him and thought he just got unlucky enough to be associated with the alt-right movement. However, any sympathy people may have had for him over the incident went out the window when he tried to accept a sponsorship from "LGB Coin", a QAnon-created cryptocurrency that glorifies and supports the "Let’s go Brandon” crowd and is worthless on crypto exchanges. NASCAR rejected this (after initially approving it).
  • After Cody Ware's arrest in April 2023 for domestic assault, he was suspended by NASCAR and replaced by his family team Rick Ware Racing with a rotating cast of drivers for the remainder of the year. After the charges were dropped in December, he would be reinstated by NASCAR, and is expected to make a number of starts during the 2024 season.
  • Noah Gragson was suspended by NASCAR and his team Legacy Motor Club in August 2023 after liking a racist meme mocking the murder of George Floyd; five days later, he and the team would part ways, leaving him without a ride for the rest of the season even after his reinstatement the following month after completing sensitivity training. Gragson would eventually end up at Stewart-Haas Racing the following year, replacing the retiring Aric Almirola.
• Formula One has had its share as well:
  • By 1991, Belgian Bertrand Gachot was regarded as a promising rising star: he had won that year's 24 Hours of Le Mans and had just set the fastest lap time at the Hungarian GP that August despite driving for the unfancied Jordan team. Shortly after that race, he was arrested and jailed for two months for spraying tear gas in a taxi driver's face, during which time his seat was filled by an unknown rookie called Michael Schumacher. The altercation didn't end Gachot's career outright, but it did relegate him to driving for the horrifically uncompetitive Larrousse and Pacific teams. After the latter team folded at the end of 1995,^note by which time Schumacher had won his second consecutive driver's championship before moving to Ferrari and really taking off Gachot retired… but in 2015, after signing a distribution agreement with Hype Energy Drinks in 1997 and restructuring the company as its CEO some years later, he worked his way back into F1 after his brand announced a sponsorship deal with the Force India team—who in days gone by had been the very Jordan team Gachot himself had driven for.
  • On the first lap of the 2006 San Marino Grand Prix, Super Aguri's Yuji Ide crashed into Midland's Christijan Albers, pitching Albers' car into a violent series of barrel rolls. Albers was unhurt, but by then the FIA had run out of patience with Ide's reputation for recklessness on the track. After initially giving him a warning, they eventually just yanked his Super License that May, effectively blacklisting him from F1 after only four races. Ide has since languished in the Formula Nippon and Super GT circuits with only marginal success.
  • In 2007, an ugly legal back-and-forth unfolded after McLaren chief designer Mike Coughlan was accused of illegally obtaining documents from Ferrari employee Nigel Stepney prior to the season premiere in Australia. Coughlan was suspended, while Stepney was dismissed, then eventually fined and sentenced to 20 months in prison. McLaren themselves, meanwhile, were excluded from that year's constructors' championship and fined an unheard-of $100 million.
  • After Nelson Piquet Jr. was sacked by Renault midway through 2009, he decided to reveal that at the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix he had, under orders from team principal Flavio Briatore and engineer Pat Symonds, deliberately crashed into a wall, bringing out the safety car and ultimately allowing teammate Fernando Alonso to win the race. With the sport still recovering from the McLaren spying scandal, the FIA came down on Renault like a ton of bricks: Briatore was banned from F1 for life, Symonds was banned for five years, and Renault themselves were given a suspended disqualification, lost two of their main sponsors, and sold their team to Lotus after the 2010 season (then bought it back for 2016). Briatore and Symonds' bans were later overturned, and while the latter returned to the sport with Williams in 2013, Briatore has no intention of ever returning. As for Piquet himself, while the scandal killed his chances of ever racing in F1 again, he has since made a name for himself in NASCAR and rallycross before winning the inaugural Formula E championship in 2014-15. Alonso, meanwhile, was found to have been completely in the dark about the whole thing, so he was unpunished.
• Formula 2 driver Santino Ferrucci had his contract with Trident Racing terminated after running his teammate Arjun Maini off-track, deliberately crashing his car into him on the cool-down lap, failing to show up to the meeting with the race stewards, and was seen driving his race car to the grid while talking on the phone. All this was made worse by allegations that the second crash was racially motivated, with people attending the race claiming Ferrucci and his father constantly mocked Maini's Indian accent. (Certainly not helping is that he attempted to run a livery with a certain politically charged slogan). As of this edit, he still has his test driver role with Haas F1, however, and he was later hired as a full-time driver with Dale Coyne Racing for IndyCar. (It should be noted that lack of payment was also cited as a reason for the termination, with Trident noting that Ferrucci claimed to have a hard time getting money from his sponsors, only to somehow have the money to run an IndyCar race. Trident would eventually take legal action against Ferrucci over the non-payment.)
• Fitness guru Jackie Carrizosa was scheduled to drive the Soldier Fortune monster truck for the 2019 Monster Jam Triple Threat Series Central tour. However, three days after her announcement, she was dropped off from the tour after it was discovered that she had taken part in an NSFW World Star Hip Hop video. Former El Toro Loco driver Kayla Blood would later take over the truck and has continued to drive it ever since.
  • On a similar note, Zombie driver Ami Houde was dropped off midway through the previously mentioned Triple Threat Series Central tour after she was alleged to possess cocaine in her racing hauler. Macey Nichter ^note Who had previously subbed in for Houde at select shows after the latter was injured. would drive the truck for the remainder of the tour.
  • Buckshot driver Brandon Budd was kicked out of the Toughest Monster Truck Tour league in February 2023 after he was arrested for human trafficking involving a minor. He would, however, secretly return to compete in Mike Harper's Monster Truck Wars league under different aliases.
• While Formula E was suspended due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the sport organised a "Race at Home Challenge" e-sports series to fill the gap. During one such race, several drivers noted that Daniel Abt was doing a little too well compared to the previous events, and the fact that his webcam was obscured only made it more obvious that something was up. A quick IP check revealed (and subsequent investigation confirmed) that Abt had hired professional e-sports driver Lorenz Hörzing to take his place. Abt's team (which, it should be noted, was run by his father) suspended and then fired him, and Formula E fined him €10,000. He managed to see out the rest of the season at the NIO team, after COVID restrictions forced them to replace Ma Qinghua, before taking a sabbatical from racing that he has yet to return from.
• Luca Corberi, a karting driver who counted a championship win in the 2012 World Cup ahead of several future Formula One drivers among his achievements, saw his later career as a part-time driver end at an October 2020 race at South Garda Karting, a renowned circuit owned by his father. After a shunt by driver Paolo Ippolito sent him into the barriers, Corberi responded by tearing off his kart's front bumper and attempting to throw it at Ippolito as he drove past. He then walked across the live circuit while ignoring the marshals, before physically attacking Ippolito at the post-race shakedown as his father joined in the confrontation. After this incident, Corberi vowed to never race again, and the Automobile Club d'Italia suspended the racing licenses of both Luca and his father, as well as the venue license for South Garda Karting.

Baseball

• While with the San Francisco Giants, Eliézer Alfonzo was caught with a performance-enhancing substance in his system on April 30, 2008, which led to him getting a 50-game suspension. Years later, when playing with the Colorado Rockies on September 14, 2011, he had another substance found in his system, which led to him getting a suspension that originally lasted 100 games, being the second suspension by the MLB to last at least 100 games at the time. However, that suspension was later reduced to 48 games instead when it was found out that during Alfonzo's appeal, there was a procedural issue found in Ryan Braun's case after the 2011 season ended that led to his suspension being reduced as well. Despite that suspension being dropped, he still never played another MLB game.
• On April 30, 2021, Hall of Fame infielder Roberto Alomar was fired from the Toronto Blue Jays and banned from baseball for sexually harassing a female staffer, which had occurred back in 2014. In addition, his retired number 12 banner was taken down by the Blue Jays and the team severed ties with him. His Hall of Fame enshrinement, however, was not revoked due to it occurring before his ban. A lawsuit filed by the staffer was later dropped
• The Houston Astros were hit with a series of scandals in late 2019-early 2020:
  • Assistant general manager Brandon Taubman was fired during the 2019 World Series for seeming to deliberately gloat about the team having picked up Roberto Osuna after a year-long suspension for allegedly assaulting his son's mother, shouting to three female reporters "I'm so fucking glad we got Osuna!" during the final game of the American League Championship Series. Osuna had indeed pitched in that game, but his performance was not especially remarkable, which made the comment stand out as unusual and glib. It was also revealed one of the reporters whom the comments were directed was wearing a bracelet promoting domestic violence awareness. The Astros initially accused the reporters of having made the whole thing up, but in the face of numerous others corroborating the story they were forced to change their tune, and Taubman was gone within a week. And the league's own investigation of the incident soon spread to the rest of the team for that initial response.
  • Sure enough, in early 2020 manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Lunhow were all suspended for the entire 2020 baseball season—and were fired outright later that day—after an MLB investigation discovered they had used a camera to steal signals from other teams en route to winning the World Series in 2017 season. Alex Cora, the Astros' then-bench coach who'd since become general manager for the Boston Red Sox, was forced out of his role shortly afterward and is currently awaiting discipline for a similar scheme that reportedly took place during his tenure with the Sox. In addition to the suspensions, the Astros also lost draft picks in 2020 and 2021 and were fined the legal maximum of $5 million. Despite this, the Red Sox rehired Cora and Hinch was hired by the Detroit Tigers after the 2020 season. As for Taubman, he has yet to re-enter the MLB system as of March 2023, though Commissioner Rob Manfred has warned him that he would be permanently banned for any further incidents.
  • Also as a consequence of the scandal, Carlos Beltrán got the Mike Price treatment, being hired and fired by the Mets in the span of the 2019-2020 offseason period. However, the Mets would hire him as an assistant GM in 2023.
• In an unusual instance of this trope, the actions of a state's government led a whole baseball event to be relocated. The MLB intended the 2021 All-Star Game to be hosted at Truist Park near Atlanta but pulled out when the state of Georgia passed a controversial voting law—one of the provisions of which made it illegal to hand out food or drink to people waiting in line to vote—citing that it disproportionately affected minorities in the state. Such an event, which typically has made as low as $37 million to as high as almost $200 million, resettled to Coors Field in Denver, Colorado instead.
• August 5, 2013, is a day that lives in infamy for MLB due to the involvement of the since-defunct Biogenesis of America health clinic. During the 2013 season, the Miami New Times obtained documents from former employee Porter Fischer that not only revealed that three of the players who were suspended in 2012 got their drugs from Biogenesis of America but also discovered ties that implicated a few other star MLB players from using drugs by them as well. After multiple investigations involving players from both the major league and minor league systems within the MLB, commissioner Bud Selig announced the suspensions of 13 different players who were connected to the since closed health clinic (the largest group punishment in MLB history since the infamous Black Sox scandal from 1919).
  • Starting with players that were in the minor leagues at the time of Selig's announcement, former Oakland Athletics pitcher Fautino de los Santos (who was last connected with the San Diego Padres' farm system of minor league teams at the time), former Houston Astros pitcher Sergio Escalona (who was with the Astros' farm system at the time), former Houston Astros outfielder Fernando Martínez (who was with the New York Yankees' farm system at the time), former Oakland Athletics pitcher Jordan Norberto (who was connected with the Athletics' farm system at the time), future MLB outfielder César Puello (who was connected with the New York Mets' farm system at the time), and former New York Mets outfielder and second baseman Jordany Valdespin (who was also connected with the Mets' farm system at the time) were all suspended for 50 games each due to them all being connected to using drugs for the first time in their careers there. Some players there eventually continued to play within the MLB system, to the point of even playing in the major leagues again, while others never played in the MLB ever again afterward.
  • As for the players that were in the MLB at the time they were suspended, we have Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Antonio Bastardo, the San Diego Padres' All-Star shortstop Everth Cabrera, New York Yankees catcher Francisco Cervelli, the Texas Rangers' All-Star outfielder Nelson Cruz, Seattle Mariners catcher Jesús Montero, and the Detroit Tigers' All-Star shortstop Jhonny Peralta, who were also all suspended for 50 games each due to them all being first-time offenders with drugs at the time as well. Most of the players continued to perform well enough afterward to the point of still gaining All-Star recognition afterward, but a select few weren't so lucky with their careers after getting hit with their 50-game suspensions.
  • Milwaukee Brewers All-Star outfielder Ryan Braun was also suspended in relation to his connections with Biogenesis of America, though his suspension came before August 5, 2013. On July 22, 2013, Braun admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs that increased his testosterone during his 2011 season, where he won the National League's MVP award that year. While he tested positive during that period, he initially avoided suspension back then due to improper handling of his test sample at the time. However, his connection to Biogenesis of America led to the MLB giving Braun an early suspension lasting 65 games, which was the rest of the 2013 season at the time. His suspension would have been much worse had the MLB decided not to "strike a deal" with Braun letting him keep the suspension as is in exchange for not appealing it.
  • However, the most infamous case of them all was the New York Yankees' superstar champion player Alex Rodriguez. Despite him admitting to using steroids in 2009 back when he played with the Texas Rangers from 2001 to 2003, he was never suspended from that period of time due to the statute of limitations at the time of his admittance. However, his admittance always stuck with the MLB afterward, and with him being a primary key figure in the Biogenesis of America scandal, the MLB sought to create the biggest suspension ever to prove a point to other star MLB players. Originally, Rodriguez was suspended for a grand total of 211 games (losing out on not just the rest of 2013 but the entirety of 2014 as well). However, due to a combination of arbitration and threats of taking his case in particular to federal courts, he was allowed to complete the rest of his 2013 season, but the rest of his suspension going for the entire 2014 season still stuck through in the process. As such, A-Rod still became the first player in MLB history to be suspended for an entire season due to drug usage. While he was able to continue his career with the Yankees, mainly used as a designated hitter with the Yankees before retiring from baseball altogether in 2016, A-Rod's name will forever be associated with steroids in baseball. And to show how frustrated both sides of the coin were, on a game played against the rival Boston Red Sox as A-Rod appealed his suspension, Ryan Dempster intentionally threw at him four times, and when he finally hit him, the crowd erupted into a cheer.
• After being waived by the Boston Red Sox on June 9, 2013, outfielder Marlon Byrd was placed on the MLB's suspended players list for 50 games. Three days later, it was found out that Byrd had some tamoxifen (used to prevent breast cancer) in his system. He was placed on the inactive player's list until August 20 that year, with Byrd jumping around from team to team until ending his playing career with the Cleveland Indians during their 2016 season. However, Byrd was no longer with the Indians by June 2016, when it was discovered he took ipamorelin, which caused him to be suspended for an entire season (162 games). Byrd would retire immediately after.
• On May 26, 2021, Mickey Callaway was fired as the pitching coach for the Los Angeles Angels and banned from baseball until at least 2022 for sexual harassment throughout his coaching career, dating as far back as 2013 when he not only previously was a pitching coach for the Cleveland Indians, but also was the manager for the New York Mets at that time. While Callaway is now eligible to return to the MLB, he has yet to do so as of the end of March 2023.
• The April 6, 1987 edition of Nightline featured a segment on the paucity of black front-office personnel in Major League Baseball. Then-Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Al Campanis told Ted Koppel that he believed blacks "lacked the necessities" for positions like his, and stuck to that opinion despite Koppel giving him repeated opportunities to walk it back. Since Campanis was one of the original "Boys of Summer" from the team's glory days in Brooklyn during the 1950s, and had played for several seasons with Jackie Robinson, famous for having broken the major leagues' color line, reaction was especially outraged, and he was dismissed from his position two days later. He died of coronary artery disease ten years later, never having worked in baseball again, but agreeing that his comments ultimately led teams to consider black candidates for front-office jobs more seriously.
• On November 21, 2017, Atlanta Braves general manager John Coppolella was permanently banned by commissioner Rob Manfred after several infractions relating to his signings of multiple international players, including that of young Venezuelan shortstop Kevin Maitán and young South Korean second baseman and outfielder Ji-hwan Bae. In addition to his infractions with international players, he had also dealt with issues relating to tampering with other teams' players and for cutting illicit pre-draft deals with amateur players or visiting them early during his tenure as general manager. In addition to Coppolella's permanent ban from the MLB after initially resigning from the team on October 2 that same year, the Braves were also forced to release 12 different prospects who were signed as international free agents for their team and declare that their contract for Ji-hwan Bae in particular was voided. However, Coppolella was reinstated in January 2023.
• Chris Correa was a scout for the St. Louis Cardinals. From 2013 until at least 2014, Correa hacked into the Houston Astros' scouting database to download a scouting list of every eligible draft player at the time in order to gain a competitive edge in scouting over them. On January 30, 2017, Correa was not only permanently banned from the MLB, but his actions also led to the Cardinals forfeiting two of their 2017 draft picks to the Astros as compensation for what happened in that period of time. Correa would also be sentenced to 46 months in prison.
• In the 1943 MLB season, William D. Cox bought the Phillies from Gerald Nugent at the last minute after initially trying to sell the team to Bill Veeck. While under Cox's ownership, the Phillies went from a joke of a franchise at the time (they only had one winning season under Nugent) to being a more respectable franchise that regained their fanbase and eventually reached the World Series in 1950 due to his influence as a team owner. However, Cox didn't see his great influence come to fruition as a team owner due to him willingly betting on his team around 15-20 times early on in the 1943 season and being caught doing so by both the Phillies' front office and new team manager Bucky Harris. Harris informed Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis about what Cox was doing in July of that year and Landis prepared an investigation on Cox. Originally, Cox denied what he was doing, but eventually admitted that his bets on the team were "sentimental" and that he did not know there was a rule against betting on his own team as an owner. Once that was confirmed, Landis informally banned Cox from his position and saw to it that Cox's position on the team was replaced by Robert Carpenter and his son Bob Carpenter Jr. by the start of the 1944 season. The Carpenter family ultimately owned the Phillies until 1981, eventually winning the World Series in 1980. To this day, no other MLB owner has ever received a lifetime ban.
• In 1908, New York Giants team physician Joseph Marie Creamer III was permanently banned from baseball for attempting to bribe umpire Bill Klem with $2,500 (which would be worth $75,400 today) in order to call the game in the Giants' favor.
• Near the end of the 1922 MLB season, despite him leading the league in ERA that year, New York Giants pitcher Phil Douglas had grown sick and tired of team manager John McGraw, especially after being suspended by him and being fined $100 for a quarrel Douglas had with McGraw. So much so, in fact, that after the suspension ended, Douglas drunkenly wrote to Les Mann of the St. Louis Cardinals (an acquaintance of his) that he wanted to leave the Giants and he wanted to leave for the purpose of not letting McGraw and the Giants win the NL pennant. Douglas even felt that if Mann knew someone to send booze to, he would leave for his home on the next train and would even go down to fishing camp to stay there instead. Mann sent the letter to Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis later (likely for the fear of being banned later on himself had he not given it to him and explained things to Landis effectively), which led to him permanently banning Douglas for his ungrateful behavior. Ultimately, the Giants not only won the National League pennant that year but also swept the in-state rival Yankees in the World Series afterward.
• In 1912, Philadelphia Phillies team owner and President Horace Fogel was permanently banned from the MLB after multiple complaints about the then-rivaling New York Giants, not only claiming that the St. Louis Cardinals' manager Roger Bresnahan played a weak lineup against the Giants to help John McGraw (who was friends with Bresnahan in that time) but also wrote and signed a statement accusing both National League President Thomas Lynch and the league's umpires that they colluded with each other to help give the National League championship to the Giants that year. Once Fogel faced the permanent banning sentence, he ultimately resigned from his position and gave the team's minority owner and Vice President, Alfred Day Wiler (the only abstaining vote from within the Phillies organization), majority team ownership once it became official.
• The Louisville Grays (one of the inaugural teams from the National League's introduction back in 1876) had not one, but two instances of this that ultimately dissolved the team.
  • The first was when George Bechtel tried to conspire with teammate Jim Devlin via telegram to intentionally lose a game for only $500 (about $12,500 in 2023). While none of his teammates joined him in 1876, a few other teammates ended up getting involved with a much worse scandal by comparison...
  • The other was when Devlin, George Hall, Al Nichols, and Bill Craver had gotten involved with throwing games for the team after Hall suggested they pick up Nichols until Hague returned from an injury he had. Grays owner Charles Chase grew suspicious of these players in particular after they accumulated more errors than usual and saw Nichols still in their line-up after Hague was healthy again. Both Hall & Nichols admitted to throwing games at the time (with Hall doing so after thinking Devlin did it first), which led to Chase demanding all the players on the team allow him to look at their telegrams to see if anyone else was involved with the scheme at hand. Craver was the only player to refuse to do so, which caused him to be guilty by association. Once Chase saw those individuals come to light, National League president William Hulbert banned them for life in order to keep the league's integrity intact after the National Association predecessor was ultimately marred in relation to gambling problems within. Both Craver and Devlin sought to appeal their permanent suspensions, but they ultimately never returned to play professionally ever again. The Greys would fold at season's end.
• Before being found to be a player listed in the Mitchell Report (a government report listing players that were confirmed to have taken steroids and human growth hormones during their time playing in the major leagues), Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Jason Grimsley had his house raided on June 6, 2006, due to suspicions of him distributing performance-enhancing drugs to other people at the time. Grimsley was later waived from the Diamondbacks (where he only played 3 games for them) a day later before the news of his drug usage came out to the public, which later led to the MLB giving Grimsley their second-ever 50-game suspension on June 12. Grimsley ultimately decided to retire rather than serve his suspension.
• Cleveland Indians first baseman Joe Harris was banned from MLB for violating the team's reserve clause by deciding to play for an independent industrial team in Cleveland that sought to offer him both money and a business (This was decades before the advent of free agency). However, new MLB commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis decided to actually reinstate him to the league in 1922, for his character and his service for the U.S. Army in World War I.
• British-born Richard "Dick" Higham previously played for the major leagues back when they were first taking form in the 1870s before later retiring from playing (amidst rumors of him throwing games as a player in the multiple positions he played in) and deciding to be an umpire instead, starting in 1881. However, it didn't take long before suspicions of him throwing games as an umpire began to take place, with the mayor of Detroit and Detroit Wolverines team owner William G. Thompson in particular growing the most suspicious of Higham. Thompson later hired a private detective to investigate Higham in 1882, which led to him finding several letters between Higham and a gambler who was well-known to the locals at the time. Those letters revolved around telegrams potentially being sent to the gambler where if Higham sent a telegram to him (which said "Buy all the lumber you can!"), the gambler would bet on Detroit; no telegrams sent meant that bets would go in favor of the opponent instead. Once the information was revealed to the mayor and other owners of the National League at the time, Higham was not only fired from his umpire position but was permanently banned from the MLB going forward. He is the only ump to ever be banned from baseball.
• During the 1980s and early 1990s, Steve Howe had dealt with serious drug and alcohol problems. He was suspended not once but seven times throughout his career for drug violations. His abuse of cocaine and alcohol in particular were so awful, in fact, that Commissioner Fay Vincent had to permanently ban Howe after receiving his seventh suspension on June 8, 1992, after admitting his guilt to purchasing cocaine 16 days before the ban was official. However, thanks to the help of arbitrator George Nicolau, Howe was able to get back on the mound to play for the New York Yankees once again by the start of the 1993 season, where he remained with them until retiring from the major leagues in 1996 and then retired from baseball completely a year later. Unfortunately, Howe never could defeat his drug addiction after retirement despite his best efforts to do so, as he ultimately died in 2006 due to a single-vehicle accident (without his seatbelt on him). An autopsy showed he had meth in his system.
• In 1910, both the St. Louis Browns' head coach Harry Howell and general manager Jack O'Connor were permanently banned from the MLB after they attempted to fix the outcome of that season's American League batting title to favor Cleveland Naps hitter Nap Lajoie over famous Detroit Tigers hitter Ty Cobb. Why they favored Lajoie over Cobb despite the team never having either player be involved with them properly is a mystery (though jealousy is perceived to be the answer according to the St. Louis Post), but they were both discovered to have tried to allow Lajoie multiple hits to improve his hitting percentage from a .376 to a .385, which would have been enough to officially overtake Cobb. The scheme almost worked due to allowing a rookie third baseman to take on one of the outfield positions before a fielding error for a wild throw to first base from Lajoie's last at-bat resulted in his average being lowered in the process. Both Howell and O'Connor tried to bribe the official scorer of the game with an offer to buy her wardrobe if she changed the error into a hit, but both failed to change the results into Cobb winning the Chalmers Award that year.^note (On the bright side of this crazy scenario, both Cobb and Lajoie won themselves Chalmers Model 30 automobiles (which were state of the art at the time), which meant the Chalmers Automotive Company were okay with giving out a perceived tie between the two that season. Though a discrepancy discovered in 1978 and published in 1981 revealed that a 1910 box score for the Tigers was counted twice for some odd reason, which meant that Cobb's perceived hitting championship in 1910 might have very well been lost to Lajoie in the end anyway due to the shenanigans on board.) As such, for a scheme was, as quoted by the St. Louis Post at the time, "conceived in stupidity and executed in jealousy", both Howell and O'Connor were permanently banned after the season ended.
• The first MLB player to ever get suspended for 50 games at the time was Japanese pitcher Yusaku Iriki. While he did sign with the New York Mets at the time of his suspension, he never played a single game for the Mets due to being with the New Hampshire Fisher Cats Double-A minor league team at the time before being suspended by the MLB on April 28, 2006, for a banned substance being found in his system during spring training that year. However, despite him serving that suspension, he never played a single game in the MLB afterward due to him trying and failing to play for the Toronto Blue Jays in 2007 before returning to Japan in 2008 and retiring from the sport after that point.
• On August 25, 1980, some time before a match between the Texas Rangers and the Toronto Blue Jays, customs searchers in Toronto found drugs on pitcher Fergie Jenkins (who ironically was born Canadian himself). After finding out about the drugs on Jenkins, commissioner Bowie Kuhn enacted the first-ever permanent ban since 1943. However, Jenkins was able to get reinstated into the MLB that September due to the help of an independent arbiter, who helped give Jenkins an acquittal due to the lack of evidence against him. Jenkins continued playing (albeit with the Boston Red Sox) until retiring in 1983. He later became the first Canadian player inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1991.
• During the 1998 season, first-year Toronto Blue Jays manager Tim Johnson regaled the team with his stories of his service in the Vietnam War, using them as motivation. But just after the season ended, Johnson admitted to local newspapers that he never served in Vietnam and made all those stories up. He'd actually been in the Marine reserves during the war acting as a mortar trainer while playing farm team baseball in the Los Angeles Dodgers system. The Blue Jays initially stood by Johnson for the 1999 season, particularly after he apologized to the entire team during spring training. But in March, GM Gord Ash fired Johnson for being a distraction to the team. Although he's worked as a manager in Mexico and with independent minor league American teams since, he's never had a job in the MLB again.
• Unlike the players that got banned for what was dubbed the Black Sox scandal, pitcher Dickie Kerr was a member of the "Clean Sox" (White Sox players that genuinely did not know about the scandal at the time and tried to play the sport like any other honest player) that won both of the games that he pitched for with the White Sox during the infamous 1919 World Series, in spite of him being a rookie at the time. However, like most of the other Black Sox at the time, Kerr was also affected by the inherent cheapness of team owner Charles Comiskey, to the point where he eventually defied Comiskey in his own way. In 1922, he intentionally violated the reserve clause in his contract to play for the semi-pro City Hall Chicagos instead of the White Sox due to disagreements on what each side was willing to accept from each other that year. Kerr was banished from MLB and played with semi-pro teams in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Moberly, Missouri (claiming he got paid more in the semi-pros than he ever did with the White Sox) before eventually deciding to reenter MLB, with commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis approving of his return with the White Sox in August 1925 after playing a year in South Bend, Indiana before Kerr dropped in quality, later finishing his career as a minor league player in 1938 and then being a baseball coach from 1927 until 1940.
• Boston Red Sox manager Grady Little is still remembered with disdain among team fans for not taking out Pedro. For context, in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS against the Yankees, Pedro Martínez was five outs away from taking the Red Sox to their first World Series since 1986, and he was tired. Though Martínez had asked to stay in the game, everyone saw plainly he was too fatigued—except for Little. On the very next at-bat, New York tied the game and went on to win in extra innings, and Little's contract was not renewed in the wake of the loss. Martínez, for his part, would see vindication when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, his last season with the team.
• Legendary New York Yankees manager Billy Martin doubled down on this trope in his years with the team, once as a player and once as a manager:
  • After the infamous 1957 Copacabana Incident, where Martin and several other teammates fought a group of bowlers who were heckling Sammy Davis Jr. with racist remarks, he was traded to the (then) Kansas City A's. He would go on to play with several other teams over the next few seasons but never played in pinstripes again.
  • He returned in the mid-1970s for the first of five stints as the team's manager, none of which would end voluntarily for him. The fourth was the 1985 season, in which he replaced Yogi Berra, ironically one of the teammates he had been involved with in the Copacabana Incident, after a slow start. He brought the team back into contention, only to see it slump during the season's homestretch in late September. After the Yankees lost against the Baltimore Orioles for the division title, Martin was involved in a local bar fight with underperforming free agent Ed Whitson. Martin was dropped again a week later after the season had ended with the Yankees just missing the playoffs.
• Then-MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn caused controversy when he banned legendary and long-retired players Willie Mays (in 1980) and Mickey Mantle (in 1983) from the league after they were hired to promote an Atlantic City casino. Kuhn believed a casino was "no place for a baseball hero and Hall of Famer." The rest of the league mostly ignored Kuhn's ruling, as did the Baseball Hall of Fame. His successor, Peter Ueberroth, reinstated Mays and Mantle to the league two years later.
• New York Mets pitcher Jenrry Mejía became the first MLB player since Pete Rose and the first person under commissioner Rob Manfred's tenure to be banned from the league for life^note A common misconception is that the MLB can "ban players for life". They can't. The MLB commissioner has the power to place players on the ineligible list, which is essentially a ban, but it's not "for life". The commissioner can also remove players from the list at his discretion, and the ban can even extend beyond a player's life, as evidenced by the still-banned 1919 "Black Sox", all of whom are long deceased. This applies to any further references to "banned for life" in the baseball section of this page. Also worth noting here that the commissioner does not have the power to ban people from the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Baseball Hall of Fame is completely independent from Major League Baseball and the MLB commissioner has no jurisdiction over it. However, the Baseball Hall of Fame has a policy that anyone on the MLB's ineligible list is also ineligible to be placed on a HOF ballot, meaning that being "banned" from MLB is a de facto ban from the HOF when he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in February 2016. It was the third time in less than a year he had tested positive (previously being banned for 82 games in April 2015 and then 162 games (the equivalent of an entire season) in July 2015), and he was the first player to ever be banned for PEDs since strict sanctions were put in place for players using them. Mejía was later reinstated by the league in 2018, and the Boston Red Sox signed him to a minor league contract the next year.
• Sergio Mitre, who had an eight-year career with the Chicago Cubs, Florida (now Miami) Marlins, New York Yankees, and Milwaukee Brewers, had last played in Mexico in 2019. Since then, he has faced an array of legal problems, such as assault and drug charges. In 2020, he was accused of aggravated statutory rape and murder in relation to the death of his then-girlfriend's 22-month-old daughter. Although no evidence was found that Mitre had committed child molestation, Mitre was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to 50 years in 2022.
• During what became the final regular season series of the year for the New York Giants, on September 27 that year, outfielder Jimmy O'Connell tried to offer Philadelphia Phillies shortstop Heinie Sand $500 (worth the equivalent of $7,906 in 2023) in order to deliberately throw games into the Giants' favor to win the NL pennant. However, instead of taking the bribe, Sand reported what had happened to the Phillies' team manager, Art Fletcher, which ended up later getting to commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis' office. When the Giants' head coach, Cozy Dolan, was questioned about what O'Connell was doing and why he did it, Dolan repeatedly claimed that he didn't remember such a thing happening, which made Landis suspicious of Dolan's action. When October 1 arrived and O'Connell later admitted he made the offer on behalf of Dolan, Landis quickly announced that both O'Connell and Dolan were permanently banned before the 1924 World Series began. While the Giants won the National League pennant anyway, the suspensions ultimately caught up with the Giants in the end, as they ultimately lost the World Series 4-3 to the Washington Senators after leading it 3-2 at one point. Dolan later tried multiple times throughout his lifetime to appeal his banning, but he was denied his appeal each time up until his death in 1958.
• Umpire Art Passarella lost his job over a blown call. In Game 5 of the 1952 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn (now Los Angeles) Dodgers, he called the runner, Yankees pitcher Johnny Sain, out at first base when he was safe on a bang-bang play. He might have gotten away with it as instant replay technology didn't exist back then, but unfortunately for him a newspaper photographer happened to take a picture right at the moment it happened, showing Sain’s foot on the bag and the ball a foot away from Gil Hodges’ glove. He was fired over it, despite this clearly being an extremely close play that anyone might have trouble with.
• During his time with the Florida Marlins, catcher Ronny Paulino was given a 50-game suspension on August 20, 2010, after it was discovered that a dietary pill he was taking contained banned substances. The suspension led to him leaving the Marlins to later play for the New York Mets in 2011. Paulino bounced around the majors and retired after a stint in Mexico in 2017. In 2023, he became manager of the minor league Rancho Cucamonga Quakes.
• The first MLB player to get suspended for more than 50 games due to drug usage (back when the first punishment for substance use or abuse in the MLB was 50 games long) was a former Golden Glove winner in Detroit Tigers shortstop Neifi Pérez. After being suspended once before on July 6, 2007, for 25 games due to amphetamines being found in his system, the MLB decided to up the ante with him on August 3 that same year, suspending him for 80 games after being caught with amphetamines in his system once again. However, he never served the entirety of that suspension, as he entered free agency at the end of the 2007 season and ultimately declined a minor league contract in 2008 due to him knowing other, younger players deserved the opportunity more by comparison, which led to him retiring from the sport in the process.
• Lip Pike, a player who was once considered one of the best players of the 1870s, was considerably out of touch and out of shape by the time he got called up to the Worcester Ruby Legs in 1881...when he was 36 years old. While with the team, he was easily the worst player on their roster, with a batting average of .111, and never managed to get even a single extra base hit in 18 at-bats for over 5 games that he played with them. His play was so wretched that fans of the sport were suspicious of him and his poor play, thinking he was throwing games. As such, he was effectively banned from the National League in September 1881. While Pike eventually was removed from the league's ban list in 1883, he would never play in the league again, with his last few years in baseball focusing on playing in the minor leagues only before ending his playing career by playing one last game for the New York Metropolitans in the rivaling American Association in 1887.
• Jared Porter was the New York Mets general manager for all of one month before being fired for sexting a female reporter in January 2021.
  • His successor, Zack Scott, didn't last long either, being fired following a DUI arrest that September.
  • It would seem the position of Mets' GM is cursed. Scott's successor, former Angels GM Billy Eppler, lasted two seasons with the team. However, Eppler was forced to resign after the 2023 season when MLB discovered that the Mets had been placing fake injuries on the team's injured list in order to have more players on the active roster.
• Before the start of the 1921 season, two Cincinnati Reds players from the 1919 championship team had vastly different bans and results from said bans.
  • For pitcher Ray Fisher, his ban came through the unintended consequence of leaving the Reds before the start of the season to take on a coaching spot for the University of Michigan's baseball team. He thought his status would be declared a voluntary retirement from playing the sport when it actually turned out to be a declaration of ineligibility in the end due to teams like the St. Louis Cardinals inquiring about his status during the season. Fisher tried to appeal to Commissioner Landis, but Landis would enforce a lifetime ban on Fisher anyway after hearing the Reds' side of the story. Even worse, Fisher initially thought his ban was officially removed in 1944 when he received a letter from both the National League and American League's presidents that gave him a silver lifetime pass to any ballpark in the country before being informed that it was still in effect by the commissioner's office. However, on a more positive note for him, his ban would be repealed by a new commissioner named Bowie Kuhn in 1980 before Fisher died peacefully in 1982 at the ripe old age of 95.
  • By contrast, third baseman Heinie Groh held out due to wanting more cash to play for the Reds again. He would accept a lesser deal on the condition of him being traded to the New York Giants immediately afterward. However, Landis learned about the trade talk and canceled it. Landis gave him an ultimatum: either play for the Reds in 1921 or face a lifetime ban in the MLB. Ultimately, Groh was officially banned for two days (making it the shortest "permanent ban" in MLB history) before deciding to play for the Reds that season despite his injuries earlier that year hurting him. Groh later got his wish by joining the Giants in December 1921 and winning a second World Series the following season.
• Accomplished Cincinnati Reds fielder and manager Pete Rose was banned from baseball in 1989 after getting caught betting on baseball, including the Reds. It was the only banning that MLB commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti made under his brief tenure before dying of a heart attack that year, and it was a decision made under a mutual agreement between the two, with Rose accepting there was factual reasoning for his banning and Giamatti agreeing to not make a formal finding of guilt or innocence for Rose and allowing him to indefinitely apply for reinstatement once per year. Rose was a legendary player and is still the MLB's all-time hits leader, but his career has been Overshadowed by Controversy by his gambling scandal. In 2004, Rose admitted to gambling on baseball in his autobiography, partly because he thought it would help his Hall of Fame chances (it hasn't). His ban was temporarily lifted in 1999 when baseball fans voted him as part of the MLB's All-Century Team. Rose most recently applied for reinstatement in 2015, and his request was denied because MLB commissioner Rob Manfred believed he did not have a "mature understanding" of how what he did was damaging to baseball's reputation and because Rose was still betting on baseball (albeit legally this time). Despite his ban and admission of guilt, his ineligibility for the Hall of Fame is a heavily debated topic among baseball fans and writers to this day.
• Marge Schott, the previous (eccentric) owner of the Cincinnati Reds, is the only woman to have ever been banned from MLB. While she saw success early on in her ownership tenure, to the point where fans loved the fact that she kept prices for tickets and concessions cheap and the Reds won the 1990 World Series by sweeping the Oakland Athletics, her same cheap ideals made her an enemy to fans later on in her tenure. She was banned in 1993 for making racist and homophobic comments, as well as having Nazi memorabilia supposedly gifted to her in her own home, telling ESPN that Adolf Hitler was actually good for Germany, using a cartoon-ish Japanese accent when discussing a meeting she had with Japanese prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa, criticizing Asian kids for outperforming other students in schools, questioning why female reporters are allowed in the men's locker room, and bashing José Rijo for not playing while he was nursing an elbow injury that had kept him out of the majors for over five years. Because of her derogatory public comments, Commissioner Bud Selig banned her from MLB and the Reds' own stadium in 1996, with Schott later selling her car dealership in 1997 due to falsified sales figures before she was reinstated in 1998, then sold off all but one of her shares of the team ownership in 1999 (effectively becoming an irrelevant minority owner) before her death in 2004.
• Near the end of his playing career, Colorado Rockies pitcher Dan Serafini was suspended for 50 games after the end of the 2007 season on November 27, 2007, due to drugs being found in his system. Serafini claimed he never took any sort of drugs while in the U.S., but he admitted he suffered some serious injuries while playing baseball in Japan and while trying to heal up there, substances that were provided to him by doctors in Japan to help accelerate his healing process up. Rather than serve the suspension, he spent the rest of his career in Mexico and with the independent (yet MLB-partnered) Atlantic League before retiring from the sport in 2012, with Serafini eventually owning a bar that once appeared on Bar Rescue in 2015 that was fittingly named The Bullpen Bar before being rebranded as The Oak Tavern.
• Not even the owner of the most successful team in baseball is spared from this. Despite winning two World Series championships in 1977 and 1978, New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner had hoped that the team's championship ways would continue on into the 1980s. However, they never did partly because he paid players like Ken Griffey Sr., Don Baylor, and especially Dave Winfield major money for great production during the season, but not later on when games mattered more by comparison. Steinbrenner lamented that fact so much that he derided each of them for failing to show up in a key series against the Toronto Blue Jays later in the 1985 season due to them not playing like Reggie Jackson was at the time. He especially disliked Winfield so much between his back injury in 1989 and him looking to be a waste of a 10-year deal by 1990 that Steinbrenner actually paid a known gangster, gambler, FBI informant, and felon, Howard Spira, $40,000 in exchange for information that proved that Winfield was misusing charitable funds that were supposed to be guaranteed for Winfield's foundation. While Commissioner Fay Vincent proposed that Steinbrenner should be suspended from the MLB for two years, Steinbrenner himself wanted the ban to be an "agreement" to leave baseball instead due in part to his standing with the U.S. Olympic Committee and in part because he wanted to see his sons take over the team eventually. During the ban, the team's general manager role was taken over by Robert Nederlander from 1990 to 1991 and then by Steinbrenner's son-in-law, Joe Malloy, from 1992 until Steinbrenner's eventual return in 1993 under new commissioner Bud Selig. When he was officially reinstated, he admitted he made a terrible mistake on his part and that he'd drop the lawsuits he made against Vincent. While Winfield eventually won a World Series championship in 1992 with the Toronto Blue Jays, Steinbrenner ultimately saw his Yankees win the World Series four more times under his control before passing control of the Yankees to his sons Hal & Hank in 2006, then seeing one more World Series win with them in charge before his 2010 death.
• While playing with the Kansas City Royals as a utility shortstop player at the time, Miguel Tejada informed the Royals about him having a medical condition that involved him needing a medical use exemption. The problem, however, was that his treatment involved the use of amphetamines (which are found in Adderall and used to treat ADD), and he failed to acquire permission from MLB to actually allow him to take his Adderall medication. That led to him being suspended for a grand total of 105 games on August 17, 2013, due to two positive cases of amphetamines being found in him. While he tried to appeal his suspension length, as it was for medical use, he ultimately decided against the appeal, partially because he was already dealing with a calf injury that likely left him out of play for the rest of the 2013 season and partially because he admitted he was at fault in this case. After leaving the Royals at the end of his only season with them, he served the rest of his suspension while with the Miami Marlins in 2014 before being waived by them without ever playing for them in August 2014 and subsequently retired afterward.
• In 1877, while playing in the League Alliance minor league (with the National League benefiting from the league at the time) and after being traded from the Memphis Reds to the St. Paul Red Caps, Oscar Walker had team jumped from the League Alliance's St. Paul Red Caps to the rivaling International Association, playing for the Manchester Manchesters in New Hampshire despite him being under contract with the St. Paul team at the time. Due to him violating the reserve clause (which ruled the major leagues from that time up until 1975), it was better understood why he was considered banned from the major leagues at the time during the December 5, 1877 Winter Meetings. Walker ultimately was reinstated into the major leagues in 1879, debuting with the Buffalo Bisons in the National League properly.
• Eight players for the Chicago White Sox were banned from baseball for life in 1921 in the aftermath of the Black Sox scandal, in which they were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series, which they had lost to the Cincinnati Reds. A group of Sox players had been disgruntled by their wages and the reserve clause and had decided to take money from gamblers and gangsters to play poorly for gambling purposes. While the eight players were acquitted of criminal wrongdoing in a juried trial, newly appointed MLB commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned all of them from organized baseball for life.
  • First baseman Chick Gandil had been the ringleader of the fix. Gandil wasn't playing in MLB by 1921 and had settled into a career in semi-pro ball. He and most other Black Sox players continued to play for such teams until they retired from sports. Later in life, Gandil admitted he regretted the entire thing, and said that he and his teammates deserved to be banned.
  • Utility third baseman and team scout Fred McMullin wasn't invited to the team meeting where Gandil devised the scheme, but heard about it later and threatened to blow the whistle if he wasn't included. In his role as team scout, McMullin was accused of giving flawed scouting reports to the honest players on the White Sox.
  • Third baseman Buck Weaver did attend the meeting, but chose not to go along with the fix. Landis banned him anyway because he knew, but didn't tell the league or team. Weaver applied for reinstatement several times but was never allowed back in baseball. Several writers have also argued Weaver should be allowed back in posthumously either with or without the most famous member of the group (depending on who you ask), but that also hasn't happened. The film Eight Men Out is told from his perspective.
  • The most famous of the banned players was the White Sox's star outfielder "Shoeless Joe" Jackson, who was one of the best players in the league in 1919. Jackson's role in the fix is less clear-cut than the others, and there are various stories as to how much he was involved. This is partly because Jackson played very well in the 1919 World Series, hitting 12 base hits, a World Series record that stood until 1964. Jackson's ban was controversial then, remained controversial during his lifetime, and is still controversial now. Jackson has the most support of any banned athlete for reinstatement, and his case has come up several times with the MLB, starting in 1924 when Jackson successfully sued the White Sox for his salary from his last two years as a player. In 1999, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution politely asking the MLB to look at his case again, but Jackson has never been officially reinstated. In 2020, the league said players are no longer considered ineligible after their death, including Jackson. However, it hasn't been confirmed if that ruling also affects Jackson's ban from the Hall of Fame.
  • The other White Sox players who were banned were pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams, center fielder Happy Felsch, and shortstop Swede Risberg.
  • Also banned was St. Louis Browns second baseman Joe Gedeon, who didn't even play in the World Series, but had heard about the fix from Risberg and had placed bets on the series. Gedeon was the whistleblower who told White Sox owner Charles Comiskey about the fix and was a witness at the trial. However, he too was banned like the White Sox players because of his involvement with gamblers.
  • Other players that were also banned from MLB by Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1921 in relation to gambling and other crime related problems, despite not having direct participation in the event themselves, included Philadelphia Phillies infielder Eugene Paulette (due to him associating with known gamblers and allegedly being gifted loans and other things by them in exchange for throwing some games against the Phillies early on in the 1919 season), Chicago Cubs outfielder and infielder Lee Magee (due to him being accused of fixing a game on August 31, 1919 alongside New York Giants player Hal Chase and later attempting to sue the Cubs for his lost salary in 1920 in relation to said gambling problem), New York Giants first baseman Hal Chase (who had alleged betting problems as far back as 1910, later earning $500 from a gambler in a loss for the Reds in 1918 when he played for them at the time and even having evidence of conspiring with other players like Lee Magee to bribe them on games in 1919, ultimately receiving a permanent ban through Kenesaw's decree of no one that bet on baseball would ever be allowed to play), Giants third baseman Heinie Zimmerman (for conspiring alongside Hal Chase to try and get more Giants players to throw games on purpose for the team in 1919, as well as allegedly throwing the 1917 World Series away (ironically against the same Chicago White Sox that also featured the infamous eight Black Sox players in question) in a decisive Game 6 loss by chasing Buck Weaver (the winning run that was also one of the infamous eight) across home plate to ultimately give the White Sox the series that year), and Giants center fielder Benny Kauff (who once got arrested alongside his brother due to them selling stolen cars despite being acquitted of the charge due to his employees deceiving him at the time).
• The infamous Disco Demolition Night of 1979 didn't just sound the death knell for an entire genre of music—it ended the major-league careers of father-son duo Bill and Mike Veeck, then the owner and promotions director of the Chicago White Sox. In the weeks leading up to a doubleheader with the visiting Detroit Tigers, Mike had been busy putting one such promotion together: anyone with a disco record they wanted to destroy got a 98-cent admission fee to Comiskey Park and the beer was incredibly cheap that night with no limit on how much beer you could buy, despite a disastrous Cleveland Indians vs. Texas Rangers game several years earlier showing how cheap beer and baseball tend to not mix well. The resulting sellout crowd wasted no time in displaying their disdain for disco. By the time all the records they'd brought in were blown up en masse at center field, a riot ensued, causing enough damage to the field that Chicago was forced to forfeit the upcoming second game to Detroit.^note No American League game has been forfeited ever since- the last National League game to be forfeited occurred in the 90’s when fans threw baseballs onto the field during a Dodgers game. Mike—who would later say he knew his days with the Sox were done the second he saw the first fan rush the field—resigned late in 1980 after taking most of the flak for the ill-advised promotion, while Bill was forced to sell the White Sox to current owner Jerry Reinsdorf one year later.

Basketball

• During the 2009-10 season, the Washington Wizards had two of their players get involved in serious firearms violations with then-star Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton (the latter of whom joined the Crips unbeknownst to the Wizards at the time) storing unloaded firearms in their lockers and drawing them against each other during an argument on gambling debts that happened back in December 2009. While Arenas already was suspended on January 6 due to an investigation relating to said firearms, both players were suspended for the rest of that season due to the threatening argument. Arenas never returned to the high-quality play he had before the incident occurred, since after one final season with Washington where he played in 21 games for the Wizards, he was waived as the first victim of a then-newly implemented amnesty clause (which existed only temporarily in 2005 before returning throughout the early 2010's by the end of 2011) where he failed to showcase the same quality of play he had earlier on with both the Orlando Magic and the Memphis Grizzlies before ending his playing career in China for the Shanghai Sharks. Crittenton, on the other hand, never returned to the NBA at all after the event, with him first going to China for the Zhejiang Lions and then playing in the D-League through the Dakota Wizards before permanently derailing his playing career by accidentally killing Jullian Jones, a mother of four. Crittenton intended to kill Trontavious Stephens, a R.O.C. Crew Blood who robbed him back in April 2011. Crittenton ultimately pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter with a weapon and aggravated assault with a firearm, which led to him getting a 23-year prison sentence, with a slated release in December 2036.
• In an instance where an entire state was subjected to this, the NBA moved the 2017 All-Star game from Charlotte to New Orleans due to North Carolina passing the infamous "Bathroom Bill" (which prohibited transgender people from using the bathrooms of their preferred gender). The NCAA also moved several games from the men's basketball tournament to South Carolina (which hadn't hosted a tournament in years due to the state capitol displaying the Confederate battle flag outside the building).
• A scandal erupted during the 2000 Paralympic Games when it was discovered that the Spanish team that had won the gold in the basketball competition had fielded a team that comprised 10 non-disabled players out of the team of 12. The team was stripped of their medal, and team leader Fernando Vicente Martin was expelled from the Spanish Paralympic Committee. All events for athletes with intellectual disabilities were removed from the Paralympic Games entirely for four years following the scandal.
• One of the NBA's first scandals led to the end of several careers and nearly ended an entire team. Ralph Beard and Alex Groza were two of the most promising basketball players of the late 1940s. In college, the two were part of Kentucky's "Fabulous Five", who won back-to-back national championships in 1948 and 1949, and they were also part of the U.S. basketball team that won a gold medal at the 1948 Olympics. In 1949, the NBA's inaugural season, Beard and Groza were drafted by the Indianapolis Olympians, played well, and were named to the 1951 All-Star Team. Their careers abruptly ended later that year, when they and their college teammate Dale Barnstable were arrested in connection with an infamous point-shaving scandal at the National Invitation Tournament. Beard and Groza admitted to their involvement and the NBA banned them for life. Without them, the Olympians cratered and then folded after the 1952-53 season ended.
  • Another player in the NBA at the time of the point-shaving scandal's height was Baltimore Bullets player Norm Mager, who played for the City College of New York, the school that had the most infamous problems from the scandal of the early 1950s. After playing in 22 games for the Bullets in his only season in the NBA, he was kicked off of the team due to his college's involvement with the scandal during that time and then was later banned permanently from the NBA altogether alongside Beard, Groza, and 30 other players from seven different colleges and universities (a majority of them being based in New York). Coincidentally, the original rendition of the Baltimore Bullets also eventually folded a few years later after banning a player of theirs, with the original Bullets also being the last NBA team to ever fold operations. Mager, Groza, and Beard were the only former college players to have played in the NBA before getting banned permanently at the time, with Gene Melchiorre joining Clifton McNeely as the only other #1 pick to never play in the NBA due to Melchiorre also being involved in the point-shaving scandal.
• Before the start of the 2022 free agency period, Charlotte Hornets forward Miles Bridges (who was initially looking to gain a hefty sum staying with the Hornets due to his highlight plays with LaMelo Ball and gaining career-highs at the time) was arrested for felony domestic violence by assaulting his girlfriend Mychelle Johnson in front of her two children to the point of strangulation, a concussion, a closed fracture of nasal bone, multiple bruises, and a neck muscle strain. Instead of getting a hefty payment from the Hornets and having his position with the team secured, Bridges had a no-contest plea deal which led to him getting three years probation with counseling sessions and parental classes alongside a 10-year restraining order from Mychelle Johnson with no jail time all while the Hornets failed to extend his qualifying offer for the 2022-23 regular season, effective on November 3, 2022. In addition to all of that, the league itself has the option to disqualify Bridges from further NBA involvement due to the no-contest plea, even if a team like the Hornets would hold genuine interest in signing Bridges.
• In a rare NBA case of being Vindicated by History, Roger Brown can be considered a case where his misdemeanor in relation to the NBA did not affect his playing career at a major level, to the point where his actions are actually recognized in the NBA despite never officially being allowed into the NBA at all. How did that happen, you might ask? It relates to a case where Roger Brown was unintentionally a part of the 1961 NCAA point shaving scandal due to him being introduced to Jack Molinas, a key component of said scandal, while he was in high school, similar to that of Connie Hawkins. Brown was not only kicked out of the University of Dayton before even playing a single game for them, but he was also one of around 37 individuals through 22 different colleges and universities to get banned from playing in NCAA and NBA competitions. However, Brown and other banned individuals like Hawkins, Tony Jackson, and Doug Moe weren't barred from playing in alternatives to the NBA, such as the planned rivals known as the ABA. Brown in particular played the majority of his professional career with the Indiana Pacers in the ABA, playing with them for most of his entire playing career, as well as most of their existence in the ABA. Brown especially was a key piece for the Pacers winning their three ABA Finals championships in 1970 (also being named the Finals MVP that year), 1972, and 1973, with him also being a 4x All-Star in 1968 and from 1970-1972, a 2x All-ABA Second Team member in 1968 and 1970, and an All-ABA First Team member in 1971. After being traded to the Memphis Sounds for 7 games in 1974 and then to the Utah Stars for the majority of the 1974-75 season, he got traded back to Indiana to finish the final 10 games of the season before officially retiring from the sport altogether. His great performances throughout the ABA (primarily with the Pacers) not only resulted in him being one of four Pacers players to have their numbers retired with the team (with most of the numbers being retired by other Pacers players that played in the ABA also) but he also was named one of the seven unanimous All-ABA Team members selected back in 1997 and then posthumously inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013, joining Connie Hawkins and other successful ABA and NBA players there.
• After Los Angeles Lakers shooting guard Kobe Bryant was accused of sexual assault in 2003, he lost most of his endorsement deals, including his longtime stand as the spokesman for Nutella hazelnut spread. The case was dropped when his accuser refused to testify in court, but Bryant's defense against the allegation—that he was just cheating on his wife—probably didn't help his case. The incident followed him around even after he retired from the game in 2016, costing him a potential membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences despite winning an Oscar for the animated short Dear Basketball in 2018.^note This was smack in the middle of the #MeToo movement, and the Academy had already been forced to update its code of conduct in the aftermath of Harvey Weinstein's exposure as a sexual predator in October 2017. However, this seems to have dried up following Bryant's fatal helicopter crash in January 2020 (the fact the fellow friends/associates, including his 13-year-old daughter and two of her youth basketball teammates, were also victims may have also played a part in it too), if Washington Post journalist Felicia Sonmez's brief suspension over tweets about him regarding this trope is anything to go by.
• Tim Donaghy, a referee who had officiated NBA games since 1994, resigned in 2007 after it was discovered that he was the subject of an FBI investigation into match-fixing. Since 2005, Donaghy had been placing bets on matches he was scheduled to officiate, using his insider knowledge of the league to make judgements and pass on betting tips to others. He was also accused of making officiating decisions that would influence games toward his favorable betting outcome. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison and never officiated a proper sport ever again. In 2021, Donaghy made his debut in Major League Wrestling, where he plays a crooked referee, fittingly enough.
• John Drew was the first NBA player to be banned due to its substance abuse policy. Despite being named an All-Star twice by the Atlanta Hawks in 1976 and 1980, Drew had problems with cocaine. He spent eight weeks in drug rehab, causing him to miss 38 games during his first year with the Utah Jazz. While he initially had enough success to the point of being considered the Comeback Player of the Year at that time, a relapse during the 1984-85 season led to him being waived from the team not long afterward. Despite his drug and legal issues, the Washington Bullets still expressed interest in signing him at one point, but then-commissioner David Stern forbade the Bullets from acquiring him due to his drug issues. To further prove his point, Stern considered a third rehab stint in 1986 while playing for the Wyoming Wildcatters in the CBA minor league the point where he was banned from playing in the NBA again. Drew was never reinstated into the NBA after his initial ban and while he eventually had a grip on his drug addiction by 2002, he succumbed to bone cancer twenty years later.
• Phoenix Suns small forward Richard Dumas helped the team reach the 1993 NBA Finals alongside their other major team members and also earned All-Rookie Second Team honors while being a starter for most of his first official season of play.^note Dumas was originally drafted in 1991, but he missed the entirety of the 1991-92 season (what would have been his actual rookie season) due to drug violations. Unfortunately for Dumas, he missed the 1993-94 season and the majority of the 1994-95 season after he tested positive for cocaine. He was traded to the Philadelphia 76ers for the 1995-96 season, but he was permanently banned from the NBA at the end of the season for violating a clause in his contract prohibiting him from drinking alcohol. Dumas later played in multiple locations worldwide until his 2013 retirement.
• Tyreke Evans, who played for the Sacramento Kings, New Orleans Pelicans, and Indiana Pacers, was a troubled star who had setbacks in his career even before the NBA banned him in May 2019 for drug abuse. While Evans eventually agreed to be reinstated into the NBA on Valentine's Day in 2022, to the point where he played for the Wisconsin Herd in the NBA G League, Evans has yet to officially return to the NBA proper.
• In November 2011, two former ball boys for the Syracuse University basketball team claimed longtime assistant coach Bernie Fine molested them, one of whom released a tape-recorded 2002 phone call with Fine's wife to ESPN, during which she stated she knew about his behavior. Two more individuals came forward with accusations of inappropriate encounters with Fine. Fine was placed on administrative leave and ultimately dismissed by Syracuse University. However, two accusers later admitted they lied about Fine's misconduct. One man was also found to have committed sexual misconduct with children and made the accusation after the Orange defeated his favorite team, the Kansas Jayhawks in the 2003 national title game. The other accuser who lied about Fine's misconduct instead said he believed Fine was a father figure to him. Though Fine was cleared of all charges in the summer of 2012, he hasn't returned to coaching. Fine and his wife later filed a defamation of character lawsuit against ESPN; citing as evidence statements made by the network personnel, including the editor-in-chief citing the way the "Outside the Lines" report where the charges were first made violated ESPN's journalistic standards; but in 2016 the suit was dismissed.
• Jalen Harris was initially perceived to be a promising member for the Toronto Raptors' long-term future despite being drafted as the penultimate pick of the 2020 NBA Draft. Unfortunately for Harris, he was banned for the 2021-22 season after he violated the NBA's anti-drug policy. He was given the option to return to the NBA as early as the start of the 2022-23 season, if it was deemed necessary by him, instead of by as early as the 2023-24 season due to him being banned during what was considered his rookie season at the time. After playing in Italy and Canada throughout the 2021-22 season, Harris looked to have his ban status removed on September 25, 2022. Since then, he has yet to officially play in the NBA itself once again due to him only being on the New York Knicks' training camp roster, though he has appeared to have been given some opportunities to return in the future due to him signing up with the NBA G League minor league as a member of the Westchester Knicks.
• Connie Hawkins is another example in the NBA of being Vindicated by History after previously being banned from play due to him borrowing only $200 for school expenses back when he went to the University of Iowa, which was paid back to Jack Molinas properly through his brother Fred before the 1961 point shaving scandal came to light. Despite not being involved with any point shaving while in college due to him being a freshman at the time^note (Freshmen players were not eligible to play sports with their collegiate teams at the time.), Hawkins was essentially expelled from not just the University of Iowa, but all colleges in the NCAA and NAIA spectrum in terms of playing basketball, with him later being banned from the NBA officially in 1966. Despite his expulsion, Hawkins still managed to carve a well-respected career for himself by playing ball with not just the short-lived ABL and the Harlem Globetrotters, but also with the rivaling ABA as well. Even then, Hawkins still fought legally to get his name back into the NBA circuit, which he eventually did in 1969 through a settlement with the league after further reports found Hawkins' connections to point shaving and gambling to be dubious at best. He ended up providing a good impact through the rest of his career in the NBA, to the point of having his number retired by the Phoenix Suns after retirement, and ended up entering the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992 due to his overall playing career between the ABL, ABA, and NBA, as well as his time spent with the Harlem Globetrotters.
• In 2023, a series of incidents caused New Mexico State University to cancel its men's basketball season and fire the head coach Greg Heiar. In November 2022 a player on the team shot a man in self-defense and the coaches on the team did not co-operate with police, hiding the gun. Then in February 2023, a different player claimed that he had been hazed by several teammates with Heiar's knowledge. The hazing included sexual abuse. After this second incident, Heiar was fired "for cause", meaning he didn't receive any of his remaining salary and the team forfeited the rest of their season.
• On June 17, 2023, West Virginia University men's basketball coach Bob Huggins resigned from his position and announced his retirement following a DUI arrest the day before. Huggins was already on thin ice following an interview on a radio show in Cincinnati where he made several homophobic remarks about the Xavier University team.
• Kyrie Irving was suspended from the Brooklyn Nets in 2021 for refusing to take a COVID-19 vaccine, as had been mandated for the sport,accusing vaccine companies of being a part of a Satanic plot against black people. He missed the first 35 games of the season due to his refusal before later coming back in part-time capacity when the mandates were lifted for him to primarily play outside of New York, with him later returning to full-time capacity once New York's mandates were fully lifted, playing the final 10 games of the regular season without any restrictions. However, this still left him with only 29 games played that season out of a possible 82 total (though with Irving playing in the Play-In Tournament and the playoffs that year without restriction) due to his failure to comply with New York's COVID-19 mandates of the time. Irving also later got an 8-game suspension in 2022 for the following season due to him promoting material that had anti-Semitic behaviors alongside other controversial conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones in mind, with him only coming back after completing a certain set of rules that included apologizing to the local Jewish community and talking with a rabbi alongside commissioner Adam Silver together. His shenanigans throughout his time with the Nets eventually led to him being traded to the Dallas Mavericks on February 5, 2023, after Irving finally decided he wanted out of Brooklyn for good.
• For the 29 years he spent as the head coach of the Indiana Hoosiers men's basketball team, Bob Knight was known for his temperamental personality both on and off the court. On September 7, 2000, only a few months after a zero-tolerance policy was enacted, Knight grabbed IU freshman Kent Harvey by the arm and lectured him for not showing the proper respect; he was dismissed three days later and was eventually succeeded by Mike Davis. Not long after that, Knight became the head coach for the Texas Tech Red Raiders for the next seven years before he retired in 2008.
• Center Meyers Leonard was suspended indefinitely from the Miami Heat on March 9, 2021, after he made an anti-Semitic slur during a Twitch video gaming livestream. He was also dropped by his gaming hardware sponsors, Origin PC and SCUF, and was later waived by the Oklahoma City Thunder when Miami traded him to OKC just a few weeks later. Leonard did not play in the NBA again until February 24, 2023, with him gaining a 10-day contract with the Milwaukee Bucks two days prior to his official return, after officially apologizing for his behavior on that fateful day in 2021. He later ended up performing really well to the point of signing not just a second 10-day contract, but a contract to stay with the Bucks for the rest of the season on March 2023.
• On January 16, 1987, over six months after the Houston Rockets made it to the NBA Finals for the second time in their history in 1986 and looking to return there, Houston's opportunity to return in the 1980s ultimately got shot down when it was announced that their shooting guard/small forward duo of Lewis Lloyd and Mitchell Wiggins (best known in the modern-day era as the father of current Golden State Warriors All-Star and champion player Andrew Wiggins) were both suspended for testing positive for cocaine, a banned substance for the NBA. While they were both banned, they both played for multiple teams in both the USBL (United States Basketball League) and CBA (Continental Basketball Association) minor leagues until they both got reinstated with the Rockets by the start of the 1989-1990 season, though not quite being the same players they used to be since then. Coincidentally, both players later left Houston to play for the Philadelphia 76ers (albeit at different times for the 1990s) and they both left the NBA by the early 1990s, with Lloyd last playing for the Philadelphia Aces in 1990 and Wiggins later playing in many locations throughout the world until retiring for good in 2003.
• On November 19, 2021, rookie New Orleans Pelicans guard/forward Didi Louzada tested positive for multiple steroid drugs in drostanolone and basic testosterone. This led to him being suspended for 25 games throughout his first season in the NBA. However, as of the end of the 2022-23 season, Louzada has yet to play more games in the NBA than the amount he lost due to his suspension (admittedly part of it relates to him recovering from a left knee injury he suffered while with the Birmingham Squadron under an NBA G League assignment), as he has since been playing for the Cleveland Charge in the NBA G League.
• Vernon Maxwell was an NBA shooting guard best known for his time in the Houston Rockets from 1990 to 1995, during which he was a core part of their "Clutch City" roster that won the title in 1994. Things began to turn south shortly afterwards when he punched a fan in the stands in response to what he says were racially charged comments mocking his stillborn daughter. He was suspended for 10 games, and upon his return became annoyed that his place in the team was seemingly being replaced by the recently-acquired Hall of Famer Clyde Drexler. The ultimate final straw came during the playoffs, when he faked a hamstring injury out of frustration against Drexler, and would be released after the 1995 NBA Finals. Maxwell's career went on until 2001, but he remained a journeyman whose Rockets success was far behind him.
• Milwaukee Bucks guard O.J. Mayo was banned from playing in the NBA in 2016 for violating the league's substance abuse policy again after previously violating it in 2010 due to the league finding he used a steroid that year. Unlike the steroid usage that caused him to lose only 10 games in 2010, the substance that was found in him was something that was considered a "drug of abuse" like amphetamines and similar analogs like that, cocaine, LSD, PCP, and opiates like heroin, codeine, and even morphine. He was eligible to be reinstated in 2018 but has yet to officially declare for it. Instead, he has since played professional basketball in other countries such as Puerto Rico, Taiwan, China, Russia, and even Egypt.
• Oklahoma City Thunder power forward Mitch McGary was hit with an initial 5-game suspension due to him violating the NBA's drug policy on July 8, 2016. However, his five-game suspension later turned into a 15-game suspension due to him being non-compliant with the NBA on September 13 that same year. Considering his suspension affected the regular season and not the preseason combined with the lack of productivity and improvements from his first two years in Oklahoma City, the Thunder decided to waive McGary from their team completely. He later ended up returning to bowling, the sport of his youth, but was open to returning to basketball in the future if he wanted to do so. Should he ever decide to do so, he will still have to carry out his 15-game suspension first before playing in the regular season for the NBA again.
• At the end of the 2017-18 regular season, Washington Wizards shooting guard Jodie Meeks was hit with a 25-game suspension on April 13, 2018, due to him testing positive for two different growth hormone drugs in his system at the time. As a result of his suspension, he not only was forbidden to play in the 2018 NBA Playoffs for the Wizards during his only season with them (which lasted for only six games that season), but he also was traded to the Milwaukee Bucks afterward to serve out the rest of his suspension there before Milwaukee waived him on November 25, 2018. On the bright side for Meeks, he did end up winning the 2019 NBA Finals later that season with the Toronto Raptors after signing up with them in February & March 2019. He has since become an assistant coach for the Birmingham Squadron G League team as of 2022.
• In the early 1950s, Jack Molinas was considered a very talented basketball player for Columbia University, to the point where he even was considered an All-Star and a better overall player than established guys like Hall of Famer George Yardley, Larry Foust, and Mel Hutchins in his only season playing with the NBA while with the Fort Wayne Pistons in 1954. However, during that same season with the NBA, it was discovered he bet on his college team while playing for them at the time, which led to his permanent banning from the NBA.^note He later tried to sue the NBA for $3 million in damages as a means of an unreasonable restraint of trade, but the judge in his case ruled against him. Molinas still played in the EPBL (Eastern Pennsylvania Basketball League) minor league from 1954-1962, with him gaining a law degree afterward due to the District Attorney claiming he had not committed any crimes at the time. Before retiring from playing basketball, however, Molinas was involved with another NCAA point-shaving scandal, this time utilizing some of his influence (including connections to Genovese crime family members Thomas "Tommy Ryan" Eboli (who was also a boxer) and Vincent Gigante) to be a mastermind affecting around 50 different players from 27 different colleges and universities (which was larger than the point-shaving scandal from 1951), two of whom also included future Basketball Hall of Famers Connie Hawkins and Roger Brown. Molinas later served a 10-year prison sentence for his role in the scandal, though getting out via parole after five years in prison, then got involved with an interstate shipment of pornography in 1973 before later getting shot to death in his backyard in August 1975 by Eugene Connor in what was speculated to be a mob-related murder.^note One of Molinas' business partners, Bernard Gusoff, was beaten to death in what was suspected to be a mob-related killing in 1974. As such, it's not unreasonable for mobsters to potentially be in mind there.
• Days into the start of the 2022-23 season, a young Joshua Primo was suddenly waived from the San Antonio Spurs without warning on October 28, 2022. While Primo initially labelled his departure as seeking mental health treatment due to a "previous trauma" he apparently had when he had his time to speak out on it, it was revealed the following day that he had been waived due to him exposing his private parts to multiple women, including the Spurs' sports psychologist at the time, Dr. Hillary Cauthen. Naturally once word came out of his problems, no other NBA team would dare sign him once he hit the free agency market. However, his case would lead to the sports psychologist in question filing a lawsuit against Primo and the Spurs themselves, with the team specifically failing to take any action on him earlier on when they had multiple chances to do so. While Primo and his lawyer maintained that the indecent exposure was unwitting and the former team psychologist was not acting in good faith when filing her lawsuit and both of Cauthen's lawsuits against Primo and the San Antonio Spurs organization were later resolved on November 17, this still leaves Primo in a brutal situation where his playing career with the NBA might be in jeopardy due to his actions in his late teen years.^note (Joshua Primo was drafted in 2021 as an 18-year-old despite playing a year at the University of Alabama and had already played in a full season and a minor part of a second season by the time he was still 19 at the time of his departure from San Antonio.)
• While with the Los Angeles Clippers on August 5, 2016, center Willie Reed was involved in a domestic violence incident against his wife. However, it took until February 5, 2017 (over a week after the Clippers traded him to the Detroit Pistons) for Reed to be given a six-game suspension from the NBA as a result of the domestic violence incident back in Los Angeles. While it doesn't sound like much of a suspension, Reed did get traded to the Oklahoma City Thunder despite his suspension and was later waived from the Thunder due to his poor production as a player, particularly through his brief time with the Pistons. Furthermore, the rest of his now-five-game suspension still remains in effect even after being waived from the Thunder, meaning if he ever returns to the NBA again, he'll need to serve the rest of his suspension before returning to play like a proper player would. However, considering Reed has since played for Salt Lake City in the NBA G League, Greece, Montenegro, and Spain as of this writing, it's most likely Reed's NBA career is finished at this point.
• Micheal Ray Richardson was once a prominent NBA player who not only was a multi-year All-Star but also led the NBA in multiple seasons for most steals in a season and also led a season for most assists in a season. However, ask most individuals about him, and they'll probably best remember him for the subject of the film Whatever Happened to Micheal Ray?, and for good reason. While he was mainly remembered for his All-Star qualities that he had early on with the New York Knicks, he ended up taking a step backward in 1983, where he underwent drug treatment three different times to the point where he was traded from the Golden State Warriors (after previously being traded to them for Bernard King) to the New Jersey Nets after one season with the Warriors. Richardson initially looked to have been cleaned up once he went to New Jersey, to the point where he returned to his All-Star status he was best known with the Knicks and was named the Comeback Player of the Year in 1985, but he had a relapse during his final season in the NBA by taking cocaine sometime between December 1985 and February 1986, which led to him being permanently banned at the time. While he was eventually reinstated to return to the NBA (spending his next two years in the CBA while waiting), Richardson never bothered returning to the NBA in the end due to seeing the perceived hypocrisy between his treatment for drug usage and Chris Mullin's treatment with alcohol addiction. He still had a well-decorated, positive career after the NBA by playing with European teams in Italy, Croatia, and France up until his retirement in 2002. Richardson also had a decent coaching career through him winning the final two championships the CBA ever had as a head coach, a Premier Basketball League championship after the CBA ceased to exist, and winning two NBL Canada championships and Coach of the Year honors before retiring from coaching altogether in 2014.
• Southern Utah University men's basketball coach Neil Roberts resigned from his job in the middle of the 1991-92 season after a bizarre incident where he was arrested for shoplifting a $30 necktie from a department store a few hours before a road game against Idaho. Roberts claimed he absent-mindlessly picked up the tie but was distracted by a conversation with some customers who recognized him and forgot that he hadn't paid for it yet.
• The last player to have been banned from the NBA at one point in time during the 20th century was Philadelphia 76ers center Stanley Roberts. Stanley had a career that was marred with injuries and other setbacks during the 1990s, but it was abruptly halted on November 25, 1999, when it was confirmed by the league that Roberts came back positive with amphetamines in his system, which led to him being permanently banned at the time over a week after last playing as a starter for the 76ers. He then played in Turkey and in the 2000s iteration of the ABA before being reinstated for a preseason run with the Toronto Raptors in 2003. While he did play for the Raptors in the preseason, he failed to impress them to stay in the NBA, which led to him playing one final season in Puerto Rico before retiring from basketball in 2004.
• For an instance of this that truly fits here despite the length not quite appearing to be that way at first, we have former Milwaukee Bucks power forward/center Larry Sanders, who actually retired from the sport entirely for a few years in relation to an instance like this. For proper context, Sanders previously had issues with fights, injuries, and smoking marijuana, which was an illegal substance at the time. The last instance was what resulted in him being suspended for the second time in his career, with that instance giving him a 10-game suspension. After previously being out for personal reasons in the 2014-15 season, Sanders ended up getting hit with that suspension, which led to him releasing a video where he admitted himself to the Rogers Memorial Hospital for a program to help treat his problems with anxiety, depression, and mood swings. His admittance to that led to him briefly retiring from the sport entirely in 2015, though he did admit he was interested in a return when the time was right for it. That time eventually came in 2017, where he signed a brief contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers and did multiple assignments with the Canton Charge in the NBA D-League before most recently joining Ice Cube's Big3 League under the 3 Headed Monsters team.
• After a year-long investigation that started around the 2021-22 season that involved interviews with over 300 current and former Phoenix Suns employees, the NBA announced on September 13, 2022, that Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver would be banned from the NBA for the entire 2022-23 season (as well as be fined the legal maximum of $10 million) due to him spouting out racist, sexist, and otherwise rudely negative remarks within the team throughout his nearly two-decade-long tenure as team owner. After fans, players, and even sponsors felt Sarver's punishment was too light in relation to the length of his actions, Sarver eventually got his hand forced into selling the Suns and Phoenix Mercury (the parent team of the Phoenix Suns) to someone else eight days after the initial announcement came to light, with him eventually receiving an offer of $4 billion from former Michigan State University champion player and CEO of United Wholesale Mortgage Mathew Ishbia and his older brother Justin Ishbia on December 20, 2022, with the sale being made official on February 7, 2023 (55 games into their season at that point in time). Robert Sarver ended up receiving $1.5 billion from the sale directly once it was made official. However, Sarver showed no hard feelings after the sale went through when Ishbia announced on February 16, 2023 that Sarver and his wife Penny Sanders were going to give team employees who had stayed with the organization for at least one year (effectively on or before February 15, 2022) a bonus of $20,000 (which was given out to over 300 people working there at the time), as well as donate $5 million to Phoenix Suns Charities. Despite him selling the Suns and Mercury teams, though, Sarver still had to serve his year-long suspension the league gave him for both the NBA & WNBA once the latter league began its 2023 season, meaning he'd still have the longest temporary suspension in NBA history for someone that held a position with an NBA team in question. The only thing is Sarver would no longer hold any ownership responsibilities in the process as of February 7, 2023, once his suspension properly concluded on September 13 of that same year.
• In April 2014, it was revealed that longtime Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling had been taped by his mistress demanding that she not "bring black people to his games", as well as generally spouting racial epithets towards black people in general and Magic Johnson in particular. While the recording first happened back in September 2013, it did not reach public light until the time period that began the 2014 NBA Playoffs. After both his players and coaches hinted that they might forfeit playoff games, the NBA quickly stripped Sterling of his share of the Clippers, fined him the legal maximum (at the time) of $2.5 million, and banned him from the league for life. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has since taken over as the team's owner, with Ballmer being the richest team owner in the NBA in terms of monetary value.
• Latrell Sprewell fell victim to this twice. The first time was when he was a member of the Golden State Warriors in 1997 and he choked the head coach of the team, P.J. Carlesimo, nearly killing Carlesimo in the process. The NBA suspended Sprewell for the rest of the season, which equated to 68 games, and he was traded to the Knicks afterwards. His second incident was after he was offered a 3-year, $21 million extension by the Timberwolves, but turned it down saying "He has a family to feed." Various teams offered to sign him, but he turned them all down, ultimately ending his career altogether as nobody wanted the troubled star.
• In 2016, Louisiana Tech women's basketball coach Tyler Summitt^note if the name sounds familiar, he's the son of Tennessee coaching legend Pat Summitt abruptly resigned, admitting to having been in an "inappropriate relationship". Media reports indicated that it was an extramarital affair with one of his players, Brooklyn Pumroy. To make matters even worse, this happened during the final weeks of his mother's public battle with Alzheimer's. He and his wife Anne Ragsdale soon divorced.
  • After he married Pumroy, this episode came back to bite him. In 2019, Pumroy was hired as the girls' basketball coach of her alma mater Fairborn High School in Ohio, and she was quoted in a press release that Tyler would be one of her assistants. The reaction was so negative that he didn't bother applying for that position.^note Not that they needed the money—under Tennessee law, Pat (who was divorced years before being diagnosed with Alzheimer's) was able to designate Tyler as the beneficiary of her UT pension, giving him a six-figure income from that source for the rest of his life.
• The NBA career of Dallas Mavericks forward Roy Tarpley ended due to his alcoholism. First, he was suspended in 1989 after being arrested for driving while intoxicated, and in 1991 he was banned from the league after another drunk driving arrest. He was given another shot in 1994, but after being caught using alcohol and violating his court-imposed probation a year later in 1995, the NBA permanently banned him from the league. Tarpley continued playing basketball in Europe and America until 2006, and he eventually died in 2015 after being absent from the sport for nine years.
• On September 25, 2014, Charlotte Hornets^*(who were recently reinstated that name after previously going by the Charlotte Bobcats from 2004-2014, with the original Charlotte Hornets team previously having their team rights name owned by the team now known as the New Orleans Pelicans after going by the New Orleans Hornets from 2002-2013, including a brief name change to the New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets from 2005-2007 due to Hurricane Katrina) guard-forward Jeffery Taylor was arrested in Michigan for one charge of domestic assault, one charge of regular assault, and one charge of malicious destruction of property. His arrest led to him being suspended for 24 games without pay, as well as being barred from playing with the Swedish national team for an entire year. However, the long-term consequences led to the Hornets playing him less than they first did when drafting him and later getting him barred from playing in the NBA again, with him playing in Real Madrid for Spain until 2022. Once he left them, Taylor played with a new expansion team in Lithuania called the B.C. Wolves.
• On September 22, 2022, the Boston Celtics suspended head coach Ime Udoka for the 2022-23 season. While Celtics fans were initially surprised by the suspension's length, they felt it was justified after further details explaining why Udoka got the suspension were revealed. During Udoka's first season as head coach in the NBA and only season actually coaching for the Celtics, it turned out he had improper intimate relationships with multiple women working within the team, which the team initially thought was consensual at first. One of the women in question later suggested Udoka made unwanted comments toward her, which further led to the suspension, with his head coach role being replaced by a young assistant coach named Joe Mazzulla throughout the entirety of the season. Despite the length, however, Udoka did not resign from the team at that point in time.
  • Oddly enough, due to the suspension being made by the Celtics themselves and not by the NBA as a whole, it didn't lead to Udoka being removed from coaching for any other team during that season if the option allowed for it. After a few games into the start of the season, the Brooklyn Nets fired head coach Steve Nash on November 7, 2022, after a disappointing 2-5 start to their season with superstar players Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving finally playing with Ben Simmons in action. This led to the Nets conducting their own investigation into Udoka and asking for the Celtics' permission to speak with him while allowing assistant coach Jacque Vaughn to be their interim head coach during that time. Despite the Celtics allowing Udoka to leave without requiring anything back for his services, the Nets reigned back on the Udoka plan and allowed Vaughn to permanently coach the team after some Nets employees expressed concerns about Udoka's return to their coaching staff. Meanwhile, the Celtics under Mazzulla 7-3 by the time the Nets went back on their initial plans at the time. Between Mazzulla's head coaching record (to the point where he even coached Team Giannis for the 2023 NBA All-Star Game and entered the 2023 NBA All-Star Weekend with a 42-17 record for Boston) and the Celtics not asking for anything in exchange for dismissing Udoka at the time, it was very apparent that the latter's time with Boston was coming to an end at some point. That point came on February 16, 2023, when the Celtics dismissed Udoka 59 games into their season and Mazzulla took over as their permanent head coach. Udoka didn't remain jobless for long, however, as he was hired a few months later as the head coach of the Houston Rockets.
• In 2022, LSU Tigers men's basketball coach Will Wade was fired for recruiting violations less than a week before the Tigers were to play in the NCAA Tournament. While the NCAA was reviewing the alleged violations, Wade became head coach at McNeese following the 2022–23 season; the final penalties came down in June 2023. Wade drew a 10-game suspension, which he will serve at McNeese, plus a two-year "show-cause penalty", which in his case will severely restrict his allowed recruiting activities during that period.
• One of the biggest busts in NBA history, Chris Washburn, mainly fell into that role due to multiple positive drug tests while playing with the Golden State Warriors and Atlanta Hawks. During his playing career, Washburn experienced tendinitis, which led to him taking anti-inflammatory medicine that led to a kidney infection during his 1986-87 rookie season. This then later led to him going to a drug rehabilitation program where he admitted he had a cocaine problem. After being traded to the Atlanta Hawks, Washburn was permanently banned from the NBA after having three failed drug tests in three years with the league, which led to him being considered one of the most infamous busts in NBA history. Thankfully, Washburn eventually kicked his drug habit years after his playing career ended and lived in poverty afterward, with him now reaching out to others to help them overcome their own drug addictions.
• Another player who was once permanently suspended from the NBA due to him testing positive for cocaine usage was Duane Washington Sr.. Washington spent the majority of his NBA career as a benchwarmer, initially playing in only 19 games for the New Jersey Nets during his 1987-88 rookie season after initially being drafted by the Washington Bullets in the second round of the 1987 NBA Draft and mostly playing for the Rapid City Thrillers of the CBA in his first professional season. However, once Washington tested positive for cocaine, he diverted his professional career back into the American minor leagues of the time in the CBA and USBL (winning MVP awards in each league during that time) before eventually being reinstated back into the NBA to play in the latter half of the 1992-93 season with the Los Angeles Clippers. Once his time with the Clippers was finished, Washington returned to playing in the American minor leagues of the time before eventually diverting himself into other professional basketball leagues throughout the world until retiring from the sport in the year 2000 in order to spend more time with his son and later train him to become a professional NBA player himself.
• L.A. Lakers forward Kermit Washington is best remembered today for having thrown "The Punch" in a 1977 on-court fight during a game with the Houston Rockets that severely shattered Rudy Tomjanovich's skull and almost cost him his life. Washington and his teammate Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had been involved in a scuffle with Rockets player Kevin Kunnert, and Tomjanovich had been trying to break up the fight when Washington punched him. The 26-game suspension Washington received was, at the time, the longest in NBA history. Two weeks into it the Lakers traded him to the Celtics. The stigma followed him around for the rest of his career. The incident also led to the NBA changing their rules on fighting: From then on, any player who threw a punch at another player — even if it missed — would be automatically ejected from a game.

Bodybuilding

• 2018 Mr. Olympia winner Shawn Rhoden was banned from competing in any further competitions by the American Media LLC company that controls the event after Rhoden was charged with rape by the state of Utah shortly after his victory.

Boxing/Fighting

• Muhammad Ali had his boxing license and his WBA title stripped in 1967 when he refused to be drafted into the US military, citing his religious beliefs and his experiences with anti-Black discrimination. No state would give him a new boxing license until 1970 when his old one was reinstated and a new license was granted by the state of Georgia.
• On January 22, 2021, just one day before undefeated UFC lightweight Ottman Azaitar was set to compete on Fight Island in Abu Dhabi, he received an unauthorized guest at his hotel. The guest was said to have climbed multiple balconies to get to Azaitar's room and deliver a bag there—ergo, he had entered the suite from outside the hotel. The UFC declared the incident a health and safety violation, and promptly cut Azaitar from their active roster.
• Thomas "Tommy Ryan" Eboli — a caporegime for the Genovese crime family — also had a side career as a boxing manager, most notably Vincent "Chin" Gigante (who later became boss of the family in the 1980s) and Rocky Castellani. However, he found himself in trouble when he socked a referee during a match between Castellani and Ernie Durando on January 11, 1952 because the ref awarded a TKO victory to Durando between the 6th and 7th rounds. Later in Castellani's dressing room, Eboli kicked promoter Al Weill^note probably because Eboli thought Castellani would win under an illegal arrangement with Weill. This earned him a 60-day jail stint and a lifetime ban from boxing. While it didn't dent his career as a mobster, Eboli suffered major PR damage when he was exposed in the aftermath of the 1957 Apalachin Meeting and his connections to Jack Molinas in the early-1960s NCAA point shaving controversy. He was later murdered on July 16, 1972, when he defaulted on a loan he borrowed from rival mobsters.
• Jack Johnson was and still is considered one of the most influential boxers of all time. But his heavyweight career was derailed in 1912 when his interracial relationships with Belle Schreiber and Lucille Cameron—both of whom were alleged prostitutes—put him in the crosshairs of the Mann Act, which forbade "transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes". Despite Cameron being married to Johnson at the time—and despite his relationships starting before the Mann Act was ever passed—Johnson was arrested, convicted by an all-white jury, and sentenced to a year and a day in prison. He skipped bail that June and fled to Canada, living in exile for the next seven years and effectively ending his career in America, though he still continued to box at the worldwide level until he returned to the US in 1920 to serve his sentence. Johnson died in a car crash in 1946; thirty years later, the ambiguously worded Mann Act—which had been used maliciously to destroy other interracial relationships in the past—was amended to focus solely on prostitution and human trafficking. It would not be until 2018, however, before Johnson was formally pardoned by President Donald Trump.
• After being disqualified from the bronze medal taekwondo match of the 2008 Olympics for exceeding the allotted time for a medical timeout, Cuban athlete Ángel Matos decided to vent his frustration by kicking the ref in the face. This, quite understandably, caused both the World Taekwondo Federation and the International Olympic Committee to ban Matos from the sport for life a few hours later, striking his results from the entire Games.
• Amateur Mexican boxer Dario Larralde torpedoed his career in 2018 after filming and uploading a homophobic rant in which he said that he would like to beat up gay men on the streets for allegedly harassing him and that Hitler was right in considering homosexuals a "plague". When the rant went viral, Larralde put on a Backhanded Apology, saying he felt proud of being a homophobe and retweeted homophobic messages in support of him, which eventually led him to delete his Twitter and retreat from public life, with the Mexican Olympic Committee disowning and banning him from competing. Shortly thereafter, his social media profiles got hacked and it was revealed that Larralde took nudes of himself and shared them with other male athletes.
• One of the most infamous moments of boxing history took place in 1983 when welterweight Luis Resto was matched up against the undefeated Billy Collins Jr.—and proceeded to beat the man to an inch of his life. When Collins' father came to shake Resto's hand, he discovered to his fury that the gloves felt thinner than normal—and an investigation later revealed that they had indeed been tampered with, with an ounce of padding removed from inside and filled back up with chalk to increase Resto's punching power. The incident left virtually no surviving careers in its wake: Collins Jr., whose career was ended due to the horrific facial injuries he received, fell into depression and, nine months after the fight, lost his life in a car crash that his father speculated was suicide. Resto was banned from boxing for a year, while his trainer, Panama Lewis, was found to have fixed the gloves and banned from the sport for life. Both men were charged and convicted of assault in 1986, and served three and six years in prison, respectively. Resto would never fight again, and he spent the next fifteen years trying to regain his boxing license before he was finally allowed to work as a cornerman in 1998. Lewis, meanwhile, maintained his innocence until his death in 2020.
• Boxer Manny Pacquiao was terminated from his deal with Nike in February 2016 after making extremely homophobic remarks when he was asked about allowing same-sex marriage in the Philippines if he was elected as senator.

Cricket

• During the Australian cricket team's 2013 tour of India, four members of the squad (including vice-captain Shane Watson) were dropped from the side for the third test for failing to do the "homework" they had been assigned. Possibly justified as the team had lost the first two tests and been criticized for a general lack of discipline, and this was seen as the "last straw".
  • Not so career-ending for the players, who as of September 2013 were back on the team roster. It is, however, cited as part of the reason the coach was fired by the Australian Cricket Board.
• Another black mark for the Australians occurred in 2018 while South Africa toured. During the third test Cameron Bancroft was caught applying a yellow tape (later revealed to be sandpaper) to the ball in order to affect the ball's flight pattern; after being informed that the TV cameras had recorded the whole thing, Bancroft attempted to hide the tape—only to be caught on TV again. The investigation that followed revealed a three-man conspiracy between Bancroft, captain Steve Smith, and vice-captain David Warner. All three were banned from playing (Bancroft for 9 months, Smith & Warner for a year) and barred from international team selection for up to 12 months following the bans. Head coach Darren Lehmann was cleared of any involvement but resigned following the fourth test in the series.
• Douglas Jardine was blackballed by the English cricket team after his aggressive use of the bodyline tactic to lead the team to its first victory in several decades caused an international incident that could have proven advantageous to the Axis Powers had Australia followed through on its threat to secede from the Crown following the Ashes Tour of 1932-33.

Gymnastics

• In November 2011, Don Peters, who served as the head coach of the U.S. gymnastics team in the 1984 Summer Olympics, was listed by the USA Gymnastics board as permanently ineligible and his Hall of Fame membership was revoked after he was accused of sexually abusing young gymnasts in the 1980s.
• USA Gymnastics announced in January 2018 that it would no longer use Karolyi Ranch, a gymnastics camp owned by Romanian-American^*though ethnically Hungarian gymnastics coaches Béla and Márta Károlyi, as a training facility as a direct result of the actions of longtime team doctor Larry Nassar, who had pleaded guilty to sexually abusing upwards of 250 female athletes, most of them gymnasts, including Olympians Simone Biles (whose Tokyo 2020 hopes were dashed in part by trauma from the abuse she had suffered) and Aly Raisman. Nassar's actions eventually became this trope for several officials of Michigan State University, where he also had been employed – amid reports they'd failed to take action against the abuse – and all 18 members of the USAG board, who agreed to resign by the end of the month (five had already stepped down prior) so that the organization could keep its status as a sports governing body. The Ranch's reputation, meanwhile, was destroyed by the Nassar Affair, closing for good only a week after being dropped by USAG, while USAG itself filed for Chapter 11 that December.
  • It didn't stop there; team sponsor AT&T dropped it like a hot potato, and others followed suit. By November, the United States Olympic Committee had moved to begin decertifying the entire gymnastics program. On top of everything else, there was serious talk about the NCAA potentially slapping MSU with the "death penalty", which hadn't been seen since the SMU scandal. To put it in perspective, not even the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State in 2011 drew so much talk about the death penalty, nor support so rabid. However the NCAA, to the shock of just about everyone, found no violations of its rules. Nonetheless, MSU settled with its group of survivors for $500 million.
  • Another casualty of the scandal, upon the mass-resignation of all of USAG's board members, the interim president and CEO appointed was Mary Bono, former Congresswoman and widow of Sonny Bono. However, that same weekend, Bono tweeted out a photo of herself at a charity golf tournament blacking out the Nike logo on a pair of golf shoes in response to Nike's support of NFL player Colin Kaepernick. The backlash to the photo, including from the aforementioned Biles... who pointed out that the head of a sports organization with a damaged reputation and desperately in need of sponsors insulting the single biggest brand name in sports apparel was not a smart decision... led to Bono resigning from the position four days later.
  • One of the aforementioned MSU officials who resigned in the fallout, president Lou Anna Simon, was succeeded by former state governor, representative, and senator John Engler for the interim. But Engler's time in the post was prematurely cut short as well after he suggested Nassar's victims might be "enjoying" the attention from the scandal; the level of criticism he faced following those remarks caused him to resign in mid-January 2019, after just less than a year as MSU's acting president.
  • Athletic director William Strampel stepped down as dean of MSU's College of Osteopathic Medicine at the end of 2017 for what was initially said to be health reasons. Then it turned out that — on top of being fired for failing to take action on Nassar — he had also engaged in criminal sexual misconduct of his own. He was eventually succeeded by Andrea Amalfitano.
  • In one case, the casualties from the fallout were literal: John Geddert, who had owned the training facility in Michigan where Nassar worked — and had himself coached the "Fierce Five" to the team gold at the 2012 London Games — had retired from coaching in January 2018, the day after USAG announced his suspension pending investigation into his alleged abuse. Geddert later shot himself in February 2021, hours after being charged with no less than twenty-four felony charges of sexual assault.
  • As for Nassar himself, he drew two 40 year-minimum jail terms for his actions — on top of a 60-year sentence he received the previous December for possession of child pornography — meaning he would be eligible for parole sometime in 2157, by which point he will certainly be dead.

Hockey

• Sean Avery, then a left wing for the Dallas Stars, was suspended indefinitely (and immediately) by the NHL in 2008 after he made a rather crude reference to his ex-girlfriend Elisha Cuthbert dating other hockey players. The league suspended him for six games and forced him to seek anger management counseling, but the Stars effectively kicked him off the team by placing him on waivers. Avery returned to play for his previous team, the New York Rangers, until his retirement in 2012.
• Tony DeAngelo, defenseman for the New York Rangers, had always been... contentious, between his history of suspensions for misconduct against teammates in the OHL and officials as an Arizona Coyote, and his open support of equally controversial president Donald Trump and promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 US Presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic. What ultimately became his downfall was the double whammy at the beginning of the 2021 season of him taking an unsportsmanlike penalty due to overreacting over being called for a hooking penalty (which got him benched as a healthy scratch two games), and then getting into an altercation with Rangers goaltender Alexandar Georgiev over a 5-4 overtime loss to Pittsburgh. Having been warned after the benching that he'd be out if there was one more incident, the Rangers promptly put him on waivers at the end of January 2021, with Rangers GM Jeff Gorton saying that DeAngelo would never play as a Ranger again. (His explanation of what happened, which included the claim that he never made a racial slur, 'only' an ethnic one, really didn't help.) The Rangers tried to trade him, but ultimately, there were no takers, no one in the AHL (which, for the uninitiated, is the minor leagues for the NHL) was interested in him, and the Rangers stated they intended to buy out his contract at the end of the season. The Carolina Hurricanes decided to give him another chance and signed him to a year contract, and the next year he would sign with Philadelphia. So far he is minding his P's and Q's, but time will tell if he's truly redeemed or not.
• Hockey player Brendan Leipsic had his contract with the Washington Capitals terminated in May 2020 after making crude remarks about some of his teammates and misogynistic comments about their wives in an Instagram chat. His brother Jeremy, who also participated in the chat, was similarly thrown off the University of Manitoba's hockey team. Leipsic has continued his career in the KHL instead.
• In February 2000, Boston Bruins defenseman Marty McSorley hit Vancouver Canucks enforcer Donald Brashear in the head with his stick, resulting in a trial and conviction for assault with a weapon. The National Hockey League initially suspended him for the remainder of the season (23 games), but lengthened it to a year after the jury found him guilty; his NHL contract expired during that suspension. Meanwhile, McSorley would go on to play for the International Hockey League's Grand Rapids Griffins before retiring in 2001. To this day, he maintains a steady career as a hockey analyst for Sportsnet.
• Several NHL coaches were dismissed in 2019 due to accusations of mistreatment of players.
  • Bill Peters was accused by Akim Aliu, a Nigerian-born biracial former player from his stint with the AHL's Rockford IceHogs, of using racial slurs against him. Subsequently, Michal Jordán^note Not to be confused with NBA superstar Michael Jordan - he's a white player from the Czech Republic and his name is pronounced "mee-khal your-DAHN" further revealed that while he was with the Carolina Hurricanes, Peters was physically and verbally abusive to Jordán and his teammates. Peters would resign from his head coaching job with the Calgary Flames a few days later.
  • Earlier that month, the Toronto Maple Leafs fired Mike Babcock following a six-game losing streak and was replaced with their minor league team's head coach Sheldon Keane. Several players revealed his dismissal was due to him verbally abusing players and creating "a toxic work environment."
  • Despite this, Babcock would return to the league in 2023 as head coach of the Columbus Blue Jackets. However, he would be dismissed before even coaching a game that September for attempting to go through pictures on players' cell phones, which many viewed as unprofessional and a breach of privacy.
• On December 10, 2019, the Dallas Stars fired head coach Jim Montgomery for "unprofessional conduct". The following month, Montgomery clarified he was fired for his alcoholism and it served as a wake-up call for him to check into rehab. In September 2020, he was hired as an assistant coach for the St. Louis Blues and was hired as the head coach of the Boston Bruins in June 2022.
• The Arizona Coyotes released Mitchell Miller shortly after picking him up in the 2020 fourth-round draft, as it was revealed that four years earlier when he was in high school, he and a classmate had horribly bullied a black, developmentally disabled boy, and what's more, seemed completely unrepentant about it, only caring about what the conviction would do to his drafting prospects. (Notably, he only issued apologies to the NHL teams, never to the family of the boy.) The resulting controversy also led to him being dropped from the University of North Dakota's Fighting Hawks team, though he was allowed to remain enrolled. Reportedly, he may be heading to the KHL.
  • This has also left a big black mark on the Coyotes as they knew about Miller's bullying and drafted him anyway, and worse, he was their first draft pick because their earlier picks were either traded away or forfeited due to violations of the combine testing policy. This, combined with their already less than stellar reputation due to having only one division title in almost 25 years of operation, a poor reputation when it comes to how they treat their staff, and falling so behind on paying rent at their home venue, Gila River Arena, that they chose not to renew their contract, has only increased calls for the Coyotes to be closed down or relocated.
  • In 2022, the Boston Bruins offered him an entry-level contract, but the backlash was so swift and so vitriolic-from the victim's family, from reporters, from fans, from Commissioner Gary Bettman, and even the other players on the Bruins-that they rescinded the contract. (What didn't help was it coming out that he still hadn't apologized to the victim.)
• Referee Tim Peel was banned from officiating NHL games after getting caught on a hot mic during a Red Wings-Predators game in March 2021, saying he was deliberately looking for any excuse to call a penalty against the Predators early in the game. The Predators went on to win the game anyway, but the players were still livid that they might easily have lost because of a referee having it out for them.
• In 2021, it was discovered that former Chicago Blackhawks assistant coach Brad Aldrich had sexually assaulted former player Kyle Beach and an unnamed player back in 2010. What made matters worse was that the team knew these allegations and did nothing about it, a la Penn State. The fallout of this revelation led to GM Stan Bowman resigning, and former coach Joel Quenneville resigning from the Florida Panthers. In addition, Aldrich's name was removed from the team's Stanley Cup win (thus far the only name to be stricken from the Cup after a win).^note The only other name crossed out, Basil Pocklington's, strictly speaking shouldn't have been there anyway as his name had been added by his son, Oiler owner Peter Pocklington, and he had no role in the win whatsoever. The impact has led many to seriously reevaluate the culture of hockey as a whole.
• Evander Kane, a winger for the San Jose Sharks, was always seen as a... divisive figure by teammates and fanbases alike given his allegations of domestic violence, arrests for assault, bankruptcy from gambling debt, and unwillingness to follow team dress and practice protocols. October 2021 marked the beginning of the end of his time in San Jose when it was discovered he faked his COVID-19 vaccination records. After serving a 21-game suspension by the NHL for violating NHL COVID-19 protocols, he was sent to San Jose's AHL team. After spending 8 games in the Sharks' farm system, it was revealed in January 2022 that Kane violated COVID-19 policies again by traveling to Vancouver while in protocol for previously testing positive for COVID-19. This proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back, as San Jose terminated his contract immediately after the second violation. A few weeks after San Jose dropped him, he signed with Edmonton. Time will tell if he can be rehabilitated or if he will bring Edmonton's reputation down with him.
• Junior hockey coach Graham James, known for his tenure with the Moose Jaw Warriors, Swift Current Broncos, and Calgary Hitmen of the Western Hockey League, was banned from coaching by the Canadian Hockey Association after his 1997 conviction for sexually assaulting one of his former players, Sheldon Kennedy. James also admitted to having subjected two other former players, Todd Holt and future NHL superstar Theoren Fleury, to sexual abuse, for which he was also convicted in circa 2011. He was coaching in Spain in 2001 but wasn't fired until the Canadian Hockey Association filed a complaint.
• In early 2023 Carson Briere, a player on the Mercyhurst University hockey team and the son of the Philadelphia Flyers' General Manager Danny Briere, was caught on camera pushing a disabled woman's wheelchair down a flight of stairs while it was unoccupied (the woman was in the bathroom). He was arrested for criminal mischief and kicked off the hockey team. He had previously been kicked off the Arizona State University hockey team for violating team rules.
• The Arizona Coyotes always had a...troubled history (not only the above mentioned Miller incident, but a history of financial troubles and even a bankruptcy), but under the ownership of Alex Meruelo did it reach such bad heights that it led to the end of the Coyotes altogether. Aside from accusations of creating a hostile work environment, sexual harassment, and nepotism, the Yotes under Meruelo had such a bad history of either underpayment or non-payment that they got kicked out of Gila River Arena for non-payment, hotels began requiring payment in advance so they didn't underpay, and various companies began refusing to work with them. Having been kicked out of their own arena, they were forced to play at Arizona State University's Mullett Arena while they found a new home, with seating capacity of only 4600 people (for comparison, the next smallest arena, Winnipeg's Canada Life Center, can host 15,321 people). To add insult to injury, they forgot the banner commemorating Shane Doan, long time Coyote captain, and it was only saved when a fan spotted it in the trash. Their first attempt at getting a new arena-built on land in Tempe-failed when a referendum on whether to allow the arena to be built was soundly rejected by voters. Their second attempt at establishing an arena in Mesa also failed. Scottsdale's mayor spoke out against their third plan of winning a land auction in their city and constructing there. When said land auction got delayed to June, the NHL-normally committed to keeping a team in Arizona-finally lost all patience with Meruelo (and with the team playing in such a small arena) and brokered a deal between him and Ryan Smith, owner of the Utah Jazz, to relocate the team to Utah and a proper arena in the Delta Center, with the sale finalized on 18 April 2024. It was a bitter pill to swallow for Yotes fans to say goodbye to their team, and a bitter pill for the players, who were kept in the dark about the possibility of relocation, and only found out when reporters on social media leaked the news about the NHL negotiating with Smith. And the worst part for some people? This technically hasn't been a role ending misdemeanor for Meruelo: as part of the deal to relocate to Utah, Meruelo retains the Coyotes IP and will get first crack at an expansion team to restart the Coyotes...if he can get an arena secured by 2029.^note Some have speculated the NHL is banking on that 'if', because they can't just yoink the franchise rights from him without risking a lawsuit, but if he fails his end of the deal he wouldn't have a choice, so look for an update in 2029.

Rugby

• Australian rugby player Israel Folau has been known for his staunch homophobia for a long time, and while his comments were regularly condemned by Rugby Australia (the country's governing body for union), he went mostly unpunished. The bottom eventually fell out after a May 2019 Instagram post ended up costing him big time; he lost a sponsorship with Asics, had his Land Rover taken away, and had his Rugby Australia contract ended.^note The particular post had Folau claim that Hell awaits for "drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists, [and] idolaters", unless they were to repent. A month after his contract was ended, Folau set up a GoFundMe campaign seeking $3 million for legal proceedings against Rugby Australia. After wide condemnation from his former teammates^note Folau had already accumulated a multi-million dollar fortune in his career, the campaign was swiftly taken down on the grounds that it had promoted discrimination. While Folau has since signed onto the French rugby league team Catalan Dragons, the fact that Folau remains unrepentant about his comments hasn't helped matters.
• Ulster Rugby players Paddy Jackson and Stuart Olding had both of their contracts revoked by the Irish Rugby Football Union in 2019 due to their involvement in a highly-publicized rape trial. While the two were acquitted, WhatsApp screenshots showing Jackson making misogynistic comments about the situation sparked widespread condemnation that resulted in them being revoked. Both have since joined new teams, but their reputation has yet to recover.

(Association) Football/Soccer

• Manchester United manager Tommy Docherty, despite steering the club to promotion, two title challenges, and two FA Cup finals (the second of which ended in victory), was fired in mid-1977 after having an affair with the wife of the club's physiotherapist. Since UK law heavily restricts the scenarios in which an employee can be fired for their behaviour outside the workplace, the club made an obviously trumped-up accusation that Docherty had been engaging in ticket scalping, which he didn't bother to contest (even though the club were technically guilty of slander and wrongful dismissal).
• Several England national football team coaches have seen their tenures end in this way:
  • After two unsuccessful qualifying campaigns for Euro 1976 and the 1978 World Cup, many supporters would have been glad to see the back of Don Revie...had he not left the role by secretly agreeing on a deal to take over as manager of the United Arab Emirates national team. It then got turned up to Career-Ending Misdemeanor levels, as the Football Association banned him for life from working in football in England in any capacity; he later overturned the ban on appeal, but it didn't matter as no English club would consider employing him for one moment, and he ended up dying prematurely of ALS just over a decade later.
  • Early in 1999, Glenn Hoddle stated his belief in a newspaper interview that disabled people were paying for sins committed in a past life, something which outraged disability campaigners. Under most circumstances, this would likely have resulted in the Football Association forcing Hoddle to make a grovelling apology and a big donation to charity. However, when combined with the ridicule Hoddle had already received for employing a faith healer as part of his coaching set-up, poor results in the first few Euro 2000 qualifiers, and known disputes between him and the players (most notably team captain Alan Shearer), it evidently caused the FA^note (who had just ousted chairman Keith Wiseman after he committed his own, unrelated Role-Ending Misdemeanor a month previously, and thus really didn't want to deal with another scandal so soon) to run out of patience with Hoddle, and they duly fired him.
  • In 2016, Sam Allardyce was fired as manager of the England team after just 67 days, after he was caught by an undercover reporter giving advice on how to bypass transfer rules imposed by the English and French FAs as well as FIFA for a profit^note The English Football Association doesn't allow for third-party ownership of players' contracts, which is what Allardyce was trying to circumvent through effectively being the boss to the players' agents, getting money based on a percentage of what both the club and the player earns for the transfer, easily in the £100,000 range.. It also didn't help that he insulted Roy Hodgson, his predecessor, during the same interview — which odds are most people wouldn't have cared about, given England's abysmal performances in the previous two major tournaments, if not for his also mocking Hodgson's Elmuh Fudd Syndwome.
  • The following year, Mark Sampson, the manager of the England women's football team, lost his job because of a scandal... but not the one that people expected would get him sacked, strangely enough. After Eni Aluko, a mainstay of the side under previous manager Hope Powell, accused him of racially abusing her and at least one other black player, along with generally abusive behaviour towards the team, the FA held an investigation that acquitted Sampson. However, the press widely accused the investigation of being a farce and firmly sided with Aluko, with pressure rapidly mounting on the FA to fire him. Eventually, in September 2017 the FA removed him from his position - not because of the racism scandal, but because he had been found to be "inappropriately fraternising" with players during his previous job managing Bristol Academy. Despite being statistically the most successful coach in the team's history until that point, the manner of his departure rendered Sampson a pariah in the women's game, forcing him to switch to coaching in the men's game.
• Sheffield United striker and Welsh international Ched Evans was convicted of raping a nineteen-year-old in April 2012 and was imprisoned for two and a half years (after initially being sentenced to five) before being released. When it was suggested that he might be allowed to return to Sheffield United, there was an immediate and massive backlash: over 150,000 people signed an online petition against his doing so, several sponsors ended their ties with the club^note specifically, musicians Dave Berry and Paul Heaton and television presenter Charlie Webster and several others threatened to join suit^note athlete Jessica Ennis-Hill, DBL Logistics (who sponsor the back of the club's shirts) and John Holland Sales (who sponsor the front), forcing Sheffield to turn Evans away. However, in April 2016, his conviction was quashed and a retrial ordered, and in June he signed for one of Sheffield United's rivals, Chesterfield. After being found not guilty at his retrial, he was able to resume his career and even spent a season back at Sheffield United in 2017/18.
• While preparing for the 1986 FIFA World Cup, Brazilian striker Renato Gaúcho escaped from training camp in order to party. He was promptly cut from the squad and blacklisted from the national team. He did, however, remain quite successful at club level, and years later, as a manager.
• In 1995, Eric Cantona, having just been sent off in an altercation with a defender, assaulted a heckler with what was described as 'a kung-fu kick' and some punches (mind you that the guy had run down 11 rows of stairs to confront him!). While it only kept him banned from football for eight months, it wound up spelling the end of his career with the French national team - he'd had altercations with the French FA in the past, and with his replacement Zinedine Zidane proving to be even better, it was decided that Cantona simply wasn't worth the trouble. Cantona is still resentful, specially as he could've played the 1998 World Cup at home (which France won!), to the point of declaring support for England where he played the last five-and-a-half years of his career.
• With less than a week to go before the 2018 World Cup, Spanish national football team manager Julen Lopetegui agreed to a deal to become manager of Real Madrid after the tournament ended. He didn't ask permission from the Spanish football association, but most people figured he was safe, and that it would be absolutely insane of them to sack the coach so close to the tournament. Which, funnily enough, they proceeded to do only two days before Spain were due to play their first match. This ended disastrously for both sides: Spain crashed out in the last 16^note though this was still better than their humiliating group-stage exit in 2014, while Lopetegui was sacked after just four months at Real Madrid, following a 5-1 defeat to arch-rivals Barcelona, though fortunately he bounced back when he became the new manager of Sevilla, with his first season at the team proving to be a success, thanks to their fourth-place finish in the 2019–20 La Liga season and their sixth Europa League title.
• Ghana's football federation was dissolved after film surfaced of program president Kwesi Nyantakyi accepting a cash gift of some $65,000 from undercover reporter Aremayaw Anas in June 2018. This led to the temporary shuttering of domestic competitions and a FIFA ban from international competition. After the organization's dissolution, Nyantakyi—who was also vice-president of the Confederation of African Football as well as part of the FIFA Council—lost all three of his posts, was fined approximately $500,000 by FIFA, and banned from the sport for life that October. As for Anas, a key partner in his venture was gunned down in January 2019 after a politician called for retribution. The federation was reconstituted in October 2019, with the national teams returning to FIFA's good graces and domestic competitions resuming. The technical staff of the men's and women's national teams was completely replaced a few months later.
• AEK Athens midfielder Giorgos Katidis was considered a rising star when, in March 2013, he celebrated a goal against Veria by ripping off his shirt and performing a Nazi salute. Katidis claimed he was simply dedicating the goal to someone in the crowd, but nonetheless, he never played for AEK again and was banned for life from the Greek national team. His career wasn't ended entirely, as it was generally accepted that he wasn't really a neo-Nazi, just a colossal idiot. Veria themselves signed him only 18 months after the incident, but he only played four games for them before being released for poor performance, and has since been confined to lower-league teams with only a fraction of the success he enjoyed prior to the salute.
• In 2013 after Croatia qualified for the 2014 World Cup following a playoff victory over Iceland, a celebration broke out, during which defender Josip Simunic, who was born in Australia to Bosnian migrant parents of Croatian ethnicity, and had only gone to live in Croatia a couple of years prior to the incident, took a microphone and led a chant of "Za dom spremni," a pro-Nazi slogan during Croatia's fascist years. He never appeared for Croatia again after getting a 10-game from FIFA that included the World Cup, after which he was too old to stay in the team for the next qualification cycle.
• Two players have been expelled from their teams in the middle of a World Cup.
  • In 1994, German midfielder Stefan Effenberg flipped off a spectator who booed him as he was substituted for a subpar performance. Manager Berti Vogts was so outraged at this that he declared Effenberg's international career over, dropping him from the squad on the spot. Effenberg would eventually return to the national team for some friendly matches under the same coach in 1998 but was never called up for any official games again. His club career was unaffected and would continue until his retirement in 2004.
  • In 2022, Cameroonian goalkeeper André Onana got into a row with manager Rigobert Song about the team's tactics. Song sent Onana home from the tournament for disciplinary issues, and Onana announced his retirement from international football a month later... only to return to the squad in August of 2023 out of loyalty to his country.
• By the end of 2009, Bruno Fernandes das Dores de Souza was on top of the world. He was goalkeeper and captain of Flamengo, having helped them to win Série A, the top level of Brazilian football. By the same time next year, all of his success had crashed and burned after the disappearance of his ex-mistress Eliza Samúdio, with whom he'd been involved in a very public paternity dispute. Reports came out that Samúdio went to Bruno's farm to negotiate, and that Bruno had arranged for her murder. He and several others were quickly arrested for their alleged involvement. Samúdio's body was never found, leading to controversy on how someone could be charged with murder without a body to prove the murder even happened—but regardless, Bruno was convicted in 2013 after a lengthy trial, and sentenced to 22 years in prison. He was released pending appeal in February 2017 to join Série C (the Brazilian third division) club Boa Esporte, but his attempted Career Resurrection was dashed when the club's sponsors pulled out in protest, and he was sent back to jail two months later. (After receiving partial house arrest, he had three brief stints playing between 2019 and 2021 before finally calling it quits.)
• In 2016, Adam Johnson, a winger who played for Middlesbrough, Manchester City, and Sunderland, was found guilty of sexual activity between minors and sentenced to six years in prison. He was released in March 2019 after serving half of his sentence, and never played professional football again.
• In August 2021, Manchester City suspended Benjamin Mendy from their team pending trial after he was charged with four counts of rape and one count of sexual assault, relating to alleged offences against three different women, including one aged under 18, between October 2020 and August 2021. In July 2023, he was found not guilty and signed for French Ligue 1 side Lorient.
• Robinho, a talented Brazilian player who had a stellar career with AC Milan, Real Madrid, and Manchester City saw his career largely end in 2017 after a sexual assault conviction stemming from a 2013 gang assault in Italy. After he was sentenced to jail, he let his current contract in Brazil run out, played two years in Turkey, and returned in hopes of playing for his first club, Santos, but his contract was quickly terminated, with one of the team's sponsors even cutting ties claiming the signing was "disrespectful to women". As of 2022, an Italian court upheld his nine-year sentence after Robinho appealed it.
• "Maracanazo" is a term used to describe two infamous moments in the history of The World Cup. While the first is (relatively) benign,^note in which 200,000-plus Brazilian fans were left in Stunned Silence as Uruguay took the 1950 World Cup 2-1 right out from under their noses the second, "El Maracanazo", unfolded in 1989 during a qualifying match between Brazil and Chile for next year's Cup. In the 67th minute, as Brazil was leading 1-0, one of their fans threw a flare onto the pitch—and all of a sudden, Chilean goalkeeper Roberto Rojas was on the ground and bleeding. The match was abandoned soon after in favor of Brazil, so they advanced—but for Chile, the news went From Bad to Worse the next day. Rojas, it turned out, had faked being injured by the flare—which had landed less than a meter away from him, but not on him—with his wound instead being caused by a blade he'd concealed in his own glove. Confronted, Rojas confessed that he had been told by Chilean coach Orlando Aravena to force a scandal and nullify the game results. The plan backfired: Aravena was banned for five years by FIFA, Chile was excluded from qualifying for the 1994 Cup, while Rojas himself was banned "in perpetuity" and never played again.
• In 2017, footballers David Goodwillie and David Robertson were ruled to be rapists by a Scottish civil court and ordered to pay compensation to their victim, in a first-of-its-kind ruling. Both were sacked by their clubs, but while Robertson retired from football, Goodwillie moved to Scottish lower-league side Clyde and resumed his career as if nothing had happened. In January 2022, however, Goodwillie was sold to Raith Rovers, prompting mass outrage from the club's fans and sponsors. Raith Rovers eventually backpedalled, announced that Goodwillie would never play for the club, and loaned him back to Clyde... at which point Clyde were hit with the same backlash, with their entire women's team quitting and the local council banning Goodwillie from the stadium. Clyde cancelled Goodwillie's loan deal, and after his contract with Raith ran out, he was reduced to making one-game cameos at non-league sides, each of whom immediately released him once his presence at the club became known. He eventually ended up at ninth-tier side Glasgow United, who (as of the time of writing) insist Goodwillie is the subject of a "witch hunt" and stand by him.
• At the start of The New '20s, Mason Greenwood was regarded as a rising star for Manchester United and England. Then, in January 2022, images and audio surfaced allegedly depicting Greenwood physically and sexually abusing his girlfriend. Within days, Manchester United indefinitely suspended him from the team, Nike terminated his sponsorship deal, and EA Sports removed him from FIFA 22. The charges were dropped in February 2023, and when United finished their own investigation in August, they concluded that Greenwood hadn't done anything wrong but agreed to part ways with him, likely because the backlash from keeping him on would've been more trouble than it was worth. In early September, he was sent out on loan to La Liga side Getafe CF, where, in spite of backlash from abuse victims associations, supporters largely welcomed him with open arms.
• Anwar El Ghazi, a Dutch footballer of Moroccan descent, was suspended from German club Mainz 05 in October 2023 (less than a month after they'd signed him) for sharing a pro-Palestinian post on Instagram that contained the controversial phrase "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free". Two weeks later, Mainz released a statement claiming that El Ghazi had distanced himself from the post and had been unsuspended as a result; when El Ghazi took to Instagram to insist that he stood by the post, Mainz terminated his contract.
• On the other side of the coin, Israeli footballer Sagiv Jehezkel was sacked by Turkish club Antalyaspor in January 2024 after celebrating a goal by holding up a message expressing support for the hostages taken by Hamas during their October 7th attack. While Jehezkel insisted that he was only calling for the hostages to be released and the war to end, many in Turkey (an intensely pro-Palestinian country) interpreted it as a broader show of support for Israel's operations in Gaza, which by that point had cased tens of thousands of Palestinian casualties.
• At the U.S. collegiate level, Oral "Nick" Hillary excelled on the pitch for the St. Lawrence Saints, a Division III powerhouse in Canton, New York, and helped the Saints become the first national soccer championship-winning team to end the year undefeated and untied in 1999. In 2011, 12 years after his crowning glory, he was coaching at St. Lawrence’s traditional rival, the Clarkson Golden Knights, who call neighboring Potsdam, New York, home. However, that year, Hillary’s world had turned upside down when his ex-girlfriend’s son was found in his home in Potsdam fatally strangled. In 2014, Hillary was arrested by the Potsdam Police Department and indicted on murder charges. Hillary was ultimately found not guilty in a 2016 bench trial in St. Lawrence County Court, which attracted national media attention, but, in a 2019 interview, he admitted that although he is coaching youth soccer on a volunteer basis, his professional career is over and he has had a hard time rebuilding his life.
• The National Women's Soccer League in the US was rocked by a major abuse scandal in 2021 and 2022:
  • First, in July 2021, OL Reign's manager Farid Benstitti resigned. Later that year, it came out that his resignation followed numerous allegations of verbal abuse of players.
  • Later that July, NJ/NY Gotham FC fired its general manager Alysa LaHue, allegedly for breaching the league's anti-harassment policy. A later report would allege that she made sexual advances to a player. A few months later, Nadia Nadim, who had played for Gotham when it was known as Sky Blue FC, accused the team of forging her signature on a contract extension that allowed her to be traded to Portland Thorns FC in 2016.
  • In August, several former Washington Spirit players accused the team's then-current manager Richie Burke of abuse, and Racing Louisville FC fired its head coach Christy Holly (male) amid reports of a toxic team culture. Burke would be fired that September; more about Holly later.
  • In September, an investigation by the web outlet The Athletic alleged that North Carolina Courage manager Paul Riley had verbally and sexually abused players on his teams. More than a dozen current and former players, representing every team Riley had coached since 2010, spoke to The Athletic, and two went fully public with their accusations, identifying themselves. The Courage fired him that same day, and the Thorns released a statement noting that some of the allegations dated to Riley's tenure with that team.
  • On October 1, the league canceled all of its matches for that weekend, and announced its own investigation into the allegations, following separate investigations launched by FIFA and the U.S. Soccer Federation. NWSL commissioner Lisa Baird resigned, and league general counsel Lisa Levine was dismissed. A few days later, Thorns GM Gavin Wilkinson was placed on administrative leave amid calls for his ouster for failure to properly handle the allegations (though he remained GM of the Thorns' then-parent MLS team, the Portland Timbers).
  • Shortly after the end of the 2021 season in November, the Chicago Red Stars announced that manager Rory Dames had resigned. That day, The Washington Post reported that Dames' resignation came about after the paper approached the team's front office with allegations of abuse from former and current Red Stars players, plus reports made to U.S. Soccer by several players alleging abuse dating back to 2014.
  • In April 2022, the Houston Dash suspended manager James Clarkson after the league received numerous reports of verbal and emotional abuse of players. The team did not renew his contract when it expired at the end of that season. That June, the Orlando Pride dismissed manager Amanda Cromwell and assistant coach Sam Greene amid allegations of retaliation against whistleblowing players.
  • The U.S. Soccer and the NWSL investigations (the latter in cooperation with its players' union) revealed more disturbing allegations surrounding the aforementioned Christy Holly. Former Racing player Erin Simon publicly identified herself as a survivor of numerous sexual abuse incidents involving Holly. Also, many former players of the then-Sky Blue FC while Holly was manager considered him emotionally abusive. On top of that, while at Sky Blue, he was involved in a romantic relationship with team captain Christie Pearce that, according to the team's then-GM, was "toxic and disruptive" to the team. Incidentally, Holly had been hired by both teams despite not having the required coaching licenses.
  • The ultimate fallout was severe. Burke, Dames, Holly, and Riley received lifetime bans from the NWSL. Merritt Paulson, owner of the Timbers and Thorns, fired Wilkinson and Thorns president Mike Golub from the entire organization, and Paulson announced he would sell the Thorns. Craig Harrington, subject of abuse allegations stemming from his actions as manager of the first Utah Royals,^note The original Royals played from 2018–2020; the franchise was revived in 2023 and will return to play in 2024. drew a two-year ban, as did LaHue. Benstitti, Clarkson, Cromwell, and Greene, plus former Dash manager Vera Pauw and former Pride goalkeeping coach Aline Reis, were required to complete anti-harassment training and other conditions before returning to the league.
• The Rubiales affair is the fallout from a series of incidents that began on August 20, 2023 immediately after the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup Final, all involving Luis Rubiales, at the time the president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF^note Spanish: Real Federación Española de Fútbol). The issue was a major sports news story for several weeks after the fact, unfortunately overshadowing what should've been a feel-good story about the most-watched women's sporting event of all time, and a great match played between two first-time finalists in Spain and England:
  • First, after the final whistle blew with Spain winning the Cup, he was spotted grabbing his crotch while standing in the authorities' box - with Spain's Queen Letizia nearby, and her 16-year-old daughter next to him. Next, while on the pitch, he carried one of Spain's players, Athenea del Castillo, over his shoulder. Finally, he grabbed Jenni Hermoso, at the time Spain's all-time leading goal scorer, by the head with both hands and forcibly kissed her during the trophy presentation. And to top it off, after the players returned to their locker room, Rubiales went in and reportedly put his arm around Hermoso, joking about marrying her.
  • The kiss was considered the main incident since it was caught by FIFA's cameras as part of the official live broadcast. Needless to say, Rubiales' behavior was immediately condemned throughout Spain and well beyond. Within a week of the final, the RFEF held an emergency board meeting to discuss Rubiales' behavior. After intimating that he would resign, he refused to do so, delivering an extremely erratic speech that was seen as misogynistic.
  • Making matters worse, the women's coaching staff had been forced to attend the meeting and sit in the front row to give the impression they supported him; the staff condemned the speech within minutes of the meeting's end. Many of the top RFEF staff resigned in the wake of the speech; Spain men's national team player Borja Iglesias said he would not play for Spain as long as Rubiales remained in charge; more than 20 Spanish clubs throughout men's and women's football publicly called for his removal; and more than 80 Spain women's internationals, including all 23 members of the Cup-winning team, announced they would no longer play for the country until Rubiales was gone. Perhaps most notably, Spain's most-capped women's player, Alexia Putellas, issued a tweet immediately after the speech saying Se acabó (it's over), referring to the misogyny she and others saw in Spanish football; the hashtag #SeAcabó almost immediately became the Spanish version of #MeToo. As if that wasn't enough, Spain's bid to co-host the 2030 (men's) World Cup^note alongside Morocco and Portugal was seen as being in serious jeopardy as long as Rubiales remained in charge. The RFEF suspended Rubiales, and he finally resigned on September 10, with FIFA handing him a three-year ban from all football-related activities on October 30. Rubiales would later be investigated for alleged sexual assault and coercion, with Hermoso testifying that the kiss was indeed nonconsensual, and also that she had been pressured to defend him. Three of her Spain teammates, including Putellas, testified regarding said pressure.

Swimming

• Australian swimming gold medalist Dawn Fraser was given a ten-year suspension, effectively ending her career, after stealing an Olympic flag during the Tokyo 1964 Olympics. In the documentary Sporting Nation, she commented that if she had been a man, nothing would have come of the incident. Fraser's story had a happy ending: she got to keep the flag she stole and was even awarded the prestigious Australian of the Year award for 1964 despite the incident. Her suspension was lifted in time for the 1968 Olympics, but her reinstatement came so late that she had no time to prepare and did not participate.
• Five-time Olympic medalist Klete Keller participated in the January 6, 2021, storming of the United States Capitol, during which thousands of violent supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump breached the building in an attempt to prevent Congress from officially certifying the 2020 election result (and likely worse), and is currently facing criminal charges in relation to the incident. He was clearly identified in multiple videos of the incident, as he's both unusually tall and wore a USA Swimming jacket. While Keller hasn't competed in over a decade, and the charges won't affect his stats, it has been mentioned that USA Swimming and the USOPC will likely blackball him from future events.
• US Olympian swimmer Ryan Lochte generated international controversy when he falsely claimed that he and three other American swimmers were robbed by armed men in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil during the 2016 Olympic Games. After authorities found surveillance footage that contradicted the swimmers' story and revealed that they had committed vandalism and urinated at a fuel station, Lochte apologized for exaggerating his story and that he had been drunk. Then, his sponsors such as Ralph Lauren and Speedo dropped him.
• Former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner was convicted of three felony counts of sexual assaults in 2016, but was sentenced to six months in prison (prosecutors had been asking for six years). Soon after, however, Turner's careers in academics and athletics were swiftly sunk, as he was not only expelled from Stanford but also banned for life from USA Swimming — which, in turn, ended his aspirations of swimming for the USA Olympic team — and forced to register as a sex offender. Nor did the fallout stop with him: Aaron Persky, the judge who sentenced Turner, was removed from the bench in a recall election in 2018, driven largely by public outrage at his leniency and his attempt to justify it by claiming that a stiff sentence would be "a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life". Considering that the light sentence was because of Turner's swimming career, many saw this as Laser-Guided Karma. Turner has since been working at a minimum-wage job in his native Ohio.

Tennis

• Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic became Persona Non Grata in Australia and was thus barred from playing in the 2022 Australian Open by the Australian government just before he was to participate after it came out that he had lied about his COVID-19 status after being previously granted a medical exemption from Australia's mandatory vaccination law. This ban turned out to be short-lived; after Australia fully lifted its COVID restrictions later in 2022, he was allowed back into the country for the 2023 AO, which he won.

Track and field

• Three-time Olympic runner Suzy Favor Hamilton admitted on Twitter in 2012 that she had moonlighted as an escort. Disney immediately uninvited her from their running competition, and the Big Ten Conference, home to her alma mater of Wisconsin, removed her name from its annual award for its female athlete of the year.
• Belizean-American track and field athlete Marion Jones was stripped of all five of the medals she won at the 2000 Summer Olympics (3 gold, 2 bronze), as well as a fifth-place finish at the 2004 Games and banned from even attending the 2008 Games after admitting to using performance-enhancing drugs in October 2007.
• Australian track and field athlete Peter Norman is almost universally recognized as the third athlete portrayed in the famous photograph of the Black Power salute during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. He, alongside Americans John Carlos and Tommie Smith, were subject to intense criticism long after the games had concluded. Carlos and Smith were suspended from the U.S. team and expelled from the games after the incident. Norman, who supported the two Americans on the podium and wore a badge promoting human rights on his jacket, wasn't invited to participate in the 1972 Olympics in Munich, despite recording adequate times for his events. For the 2000 Olympics' opening ceremony in Sydney, the U.S. team invited Norman as their guest after the Australian team declined his offer. It wouldn't be until 2012—six years after Norman's fatal heart attack; Smith and Carlos were both pallbearers at his funeral—that the Australian government issued a public apology to Norman's family.
• Oscar Pistorius, a disabled South African sprint runner who became famous for managing to do extremely well in spite of having lost his feet as a child, saw his career forever end following a murder trial in 2013 when it was discovered he had killed his South African model girlfriend Reeva Rebecca Steenkamp. According to Pistorius, he had woken up to her in the bathroom, and thinking she was an intruder, grabbed his gun and fired into the bathroom, killing her. Despite testimony that it was an accident, he was tried for involuntary manslaughter ("culpable homicide" in South Africa) and received several years in prison as a result. Though he attempted to file for an appeal several times, his charges were bumped up to a straight murder charge, and each appeal was rejected, which put the final nail in his career, and he would lose all the fame and honors given prior to the trial.
• American track runner Sha'Carri Richardson was infamously disqualified from the 2020 Summer Olympics when she tested positive for cannabis use during the trials (Richardson stated she had used cannabis a month prior to cope with the death of her mother). Her ban resulted in much criticism, arguing that cannabis doesn't count as a performance-enhancing drug.

Winter sports

• Gilles Beyer, once an elite figure skating coach and the 1978 French national champion in men's skating, saw his coaching career come to an end after Sarah Abitbol, a former pair skater and ten-time French national champion, accused him of sexually abusing his minor students, including herself, in her book in 2020. In the wake of these accusations, more French skaters came forward with stories of being abused by Beyer, including Hélène Godard, Laura Detante, and Najma Mahamoud, and in January 2021, Beyer was officially charged with sexual assault and sexual harassment, though due to exceeding the statute of limitations, the cases of Abitbol, Godard, and several other former students won't be able to be prosecuted.
• French pair skater Morgan Ciprès's career ended in December 2019 after he was investigated by the U.S. Center for SafeSport for sending sexually explicit photos to a 13-year-old girl who was a student at his training center back in 2017. Even more, it was found that his coaches John Zimmerman, Silvia Fontana, and Vinny Dispenza had allegedly known about the incident but threatened the girl and her family into keeping silent during the run-up to the 2018 Winter Olympics. With Ciprès retiring from skating in the face of third-degree felony charges and an arrest warrant, it's safe to say that his skating career is officially over for good.
• Prior to the 1968 Winter Olympics at Grenoble, the East Germans were considered heavy favorites to win the women's luge event, thanks in no small part to star Ortrun Enderlein. And sure enough, by the time the competition was halted by bad weather, Enderlein was leading the way—followed closely behind by her teammates Anna-Maria Müller and Angela Knösel, who came within a whisker of ensuring a podium sweep. But accusations soon emerged that all three women had heated the runners of their sleds so as to increase their speed on the icy track; reportedly, they vaporized the snow under them when they were later tested. Enderlein, Müller, and Knösel were promptly disqualified, with the medals going to Italian Erica Lechner and a pair of West Germans.^note All three East Germans would later pledge their innocence, and things got murkier still in 2006 when unsealed Stasi documents alleged that the man who ordered the sleds tested had been bribed to declare them tampered with. To this day, the question of whether they cheated at all has not been resolved, and even the modern German media maintains they did not.
• Didier Gailhaguet, the former president of the French Federation of Ice Sports, had always been a controversial figure in the French figure skating world and had been a key player in the pair skating scandal at the 2002 Winter Olympics. However, he became implicated in another scandal in February 2020, when former pair skater Sarah Abitbol accused him of covering up abuse allegations against Gilles Beyer, a coach and FFSG official accused of sexually abusing students when they were minors, including Abitbol herself. This had also coincided with Gailhaguet's efforts in defending the aforementioned pair skater Morgan Ciprès. The severity of the scandal resulted in an ultimatum from Sports Minister Roxana Maracineanu that Gailhaguet resign, otherwise FFSG would be decertified. In the end, Gailhaguet resigned his post and was succeeded by retired ice dancer Nathalie Péchalat.
• Marie-Reine Le Gougne, a French figure skating judge, lost her position in the ISU due to her involvement in vote-swapping for the pairs' figure skating scandal at the 2002 Winter Olympics, where Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze of Russia won the gold medal over Jamie Salé and David Pelletier of Canada, who were the crowd favourites for the event. When she was confronted by the chair of the ISU's technical committee, Le Gougne broke down and confessed to being pressured by Didier Gailhaguet, the head of the French figure skating federation, into voting for the Russian pair as part of a deal to secure the ice dancing gold for the French team. While she tried to backtrack her statements in the following days, both Le Gougne and Gailhaguet were not only prohibited from the judging panel at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin but were suspended from judging for three years by the ISU. In fact, as of 2021, Le Gougne has not judged a single figure skating competition since 2002, and the ISU judging system was changed to keep the judges' votes anonymous for future competitions.
• Figure skater Tonya Harding made history as the first American woman to ever land a triple axel. But her momentum was abruptly halted in January 1994 after her rival Nancy Kerrigan was injured in an attack Harding's ex-husband Jeff Gillooly had planned. While Harding denied any role in the attack itself, she eventually pleaded guilty to conspiring to hinder the prosecution of those involved. The US Figure Skating Association stripped her of her 1994 US Championship title and issued a lifetime ban from the sport—as a skater or even as a coach. Harding's name has since remained synonymous for someone wanting to ruthlessly take out the competition; in 2017, Margot Robbie would portray her in I, Tonya, a role which earned her an Academy Award nod for Best Actress.
• In March 2022, Olympic figure skater Anastasiia Shabotova came under fire for liking Evgeni Plushenko's Instagram post supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As a result, Shabotova was withdrawn from representing Ukraine during the 2022 World Figure Skating Championships and was subsequently expelled from the Ukrainian national team.
• Two months after she retired from figure skating, Maria Sotskova was disqualified for 10 years by the Russian Anti-Doping Agency for forging a medical certificate to justify a doping violation after she'd tested positive for using a prohibited substance. As of March 2021, Sotskova has been banned from figure skating until April 5, 2030, backdating the start of her ban to April 2020.
• John Zimmerman, a former pair skater and coach of French pair skating duo Vanessa James/Morgan Ciprès (see above), was accused in a U.S. Center for SafeSport investigation for covering up alleged sexual abuse committed by Ciprès against a 13-year-old girl at his training center in Florida back in December 2017, going as far as threatening the girl and her family into keeping silent to avoid impeding James and Ciprès' training for the 2018 Winter Olympics. Despite denying the allegations, Zimmerman was officially suspended by SafeSport in March 2021 for abuse of process, emotional misconduct, and failure to report an incident.

Other sports

• Professional golfer Tiger Woods lost a number of endorsement deals after details of his multiple sexual affairs began coming out in 2009. Woods' brand was that of a squeaky clean, upstanding family man, and a seemingly endless conga line of mistresses coming out of the woodwork destroyed that image. His only major sponsor that stuck with him was Nike, who released a famously incomprehensible advertisement in support of him. Making this worse was that this fall from grace was accompanied by a years-long slump where it seemed he was just going through the motions in between injuries and extended hiatuses. It wouldn't be until 2019, when Woods won the Masters championship when he began showing the spark and flair that made him a star in his youth. It appeared that this rebound could have heralded a return to form... until February 23, 2021, when he lost control of his SUV while traveling at grossly excessive speed on a Southern California road,^*The road he was on had a speed limit of 40 mph (65 km/h). The accident report (which Woods allowed to be released) indicated that he had been going as fast as 87 mph on said road before the accident, and was likely traveling at about 75 mph when he lost control. crashing and suffering multiple leg fractures that, by his own admission, permanently stunted his game to the point where he could never return to golf full-time.
• Cyclist Lance Armstrong, despite being the founder of the cancer-fighting group "Livestrong", removed himself from the organization in 2012 after allegations of doping arose and wouldn't go away. He stated that he was leaving it to avoid tarnishing the group's image. And then, once the doping allegations turned out to be true, he was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and disqualified from participating in any future events.
• In December 2014, Japanese volleyball player Kengoh Oh was suspended from the Toray Arrows team after stealing money from a wallet. The amount involved was roughly worth $1,200. It remains unclear why he thought this was a good idea.
• Brazilian volleyball player Maurício Souza was already becoming unpopular due to his political views (and it didn't help that, after an underwhelming Olympics where the team finished fourth, he posted on Instagram specifically to apologize to Jair Bolsonaro). But him being a Heteronormative Crusader about a panel in Superman: Son of Kal-El where Jon Kent kissed a man was too much, leading Souza's team to waive him and the national team's coach to say he would be dropped for future tournaments. Seeing his future in the sport wane, one year later he ran for Congress and was elected.

Sports broadcasting

• Following his sexual assault charge in 1997, play-by-play announcer Marv Albert was dismissed as NBC's #1 play-by-play voice. He returned to the NBA with Turner Sports in the 1998-1999 season and worked select games for NBC in the following season. Albert reclaimed the #1 spot with NBC when his successor, Bob Costas, stepped down. This also cost him a guest appearance on The Simpsons in the episode "Bart Star", but he would later appear as himself in the episode "The Burns and the Bees".
• Turner Sports' NBA commentator Greg Anthony was suspended in January 2015 after he was arrested on charges of soliciting a prostitute. His contract with CBS Sports was also simultaneously suspended.
• Ron Atkinson, once a respected football manager for Manchester United in The '80s and a very popular football commentator for ITV during The '90s and first half of the Turn of the Millennium, lost his career and his reputation virtually overnight in the aftermath of Chelsea's 3–1 loss to Monaco in the 2004 Champions League semi-final. Frustrated with the underwhelming performance of the (black) Chelsea defender Marcel Desailly during the match, Atkinson referred to him using a racial slur while thinking the microphone was switched off... except it wasn't. Transmission in the UK had finished, but his remarks were broadcast to countries in the Middle East, and the rest is history.^note It was later remarked that had Atkinson just confined himself to talking about a "lazy, thick" player on the field and left out the slur, he could have been describing any of the twenty-two players out there.
• Thom Brennaman, the play-by-play announcer for the Cincinnati Reds and an NFL commentator for Fox Sports, was caught on a hot mic uttering the sentence, "One of the fag capitals of the world," referring to an unidentified city. Brennaman was suspended (and later stepped down) by the Reds and was taken off of Fox's NFL coverage for the 2020 season.
• Grant Napear, who had been serving as the radio and (eventually) TV play-by-play voice for the NBA's Sacramento Kings since 1988, was let go from that gig as well as from his show on Sacramento's KHTK radio station (which carries Kings games) after he tweeted "All lives matter" in a response to former Kings center DeMarcus Cousins regarding the Black Lives Matter movement.
• Canadian hockey commentator Don Cherry was removed from his long-running role on Hockey Night in Canada in November 2019 after he alleged, with no evidence, that immigrants to Canada were disrespecting veterans and war dead by not wearing poppies on Remembrance Day. The comments, which he made on live television during a political commentary section of the sports program, angered the Canadian public, his co-workers at Hockey Night and the NHL, while the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council reported they had received an overwhelming number of complaints. Cherry had been making xenophobic or controversial statements on air for years, including comments about European and French Canadian players, and he had become a controversial figure in Canadian hockey despite his fame in the English-speaking part of the country. The Remembrance Day incident proved to be the last draw for Sportsnet, and he was terminated from his role on the show two days later—on the holiday itself. Cherry has since started a podcast.
• John Focke, the radio play-by-play voice for the NBA's Charlotte Hornets, was let go in 2020 after posting a Tweet about a playoff series between the Utah Jazz and the Denver Nuggets, in which the latter team was referred to as a certain racial slur, which Focke later claimed was a typo.
• Controversial conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh was hired by ESPN in 2003 to provide sports analysis and commentary on their Sunday NFL Countdown pre-game show. The decision proved to be disastrous: Just four weeks into the season, he was fired on the spot after making racially charged comments about quarterback Donovan McNabb (suggesting that McNabb was overrated because "The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well").
• Sportswriter Jay Mariotti was fired from the ESPN panel show Around The Horn in 2010 after he was arrested on domestic violence charges. He was also fired from his writing job for AOL for the same reason. While some of the charges against Mariotti were later expunged from his record, he has never returned to Around the Horn.
• Over the years, former NHL player, GM, and NHL on NBC analyst Mike Milbury has made a series of comments that never sit well with NHL players and fans alike, but it was a series of things he said in August 2020 that eventually ended his broadcasting career. First, Milbury accused Maple Leafs defenseman Jake Muzzin of faking an injury that required him to be removed from a game on a stretcher. Then, he criticized Boston Bruins star goalie Tuukka Rask for opting out of the Stanley Cup Playoffs for what later turned out to be a medical emergency involving Rask's daughter. But the straw that broke the camel's back was when he praised the NHL's anti-COVID-19 bubble system because, without public spectators, there were "not even any women here to disrupt [the players'] concentration". After Milbury was condemned not just by other sports broadcasters but by the NHL itself, he apologized and was effectively suspended for a week by NBC. On January 11, 2021, it was announced that Milbury's tenure at NBC had officially come to an end.
• Sports journalist Rob Parker was dismissed from ESPN2's First Take in 2013 after controversial comments in which he alleged Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III was a "cornball brother" and following it with a No True Scotsman invocation. Three years before, Parker resigned from his previous job at The Detroit News over a question he asked in a press conference to then-Detroit Lions coach Rod Marinelli if his daughter should not have married defensive coordinator Joe Barry.
• In 2019, former longtime NHL player Jeremy Roenick was suspended and then fired from his job as an NHL analyst for NBC for making sexual comments about co-host Kathryn Tappen on the Spittin' Chiclets podcast.
• In June 2012, Arizona Diamondbacks broadcaster Daron Sutton was fired for wearing a suit, instead of a polo shirt with a team logo on it. His partner Mark Grace ended up being fired later in the season, but for DUI.
• Andy Gray and Richard Keys were fired by Sky Sports in January 2011 after making sexist comments about a female official's performance in a Premier League game, whilst cameras were rolling but they were off-air, only for the footage to be leaked, with more footage showing it wasn't a one-time thing. They were quickly picked up by talkSPORT to host a radio show and eventually returned to television with beIN Sports (formerly Al Jazeera Sport), but the damage was done.
• In May 2013, then-named Comcast SportsNet Chicago^note  It would be renamed as NBC Sports Chicago in late 2017, thanks to NBC acquiring the CSNs as a whole and rebranding them as the NBC Sports Regional Networks earlier that year let Chicago Blackhawks reporter Susannah Collins go after she mistakenly said that the Blackhawks "enjoyed a tremendous amount of sex" rather than success during the (lockout-shortened) regular season. The network later claimed that her release was also due to her hosting a web mini-series called Sports Nutz, which has profane content that the network failed to discover before she was hired.
• NFL Network immediately terminated analyst and former defensive tackle Warren Sapp in February 2015 after he was arrested for soliciting a prostitute, as well as assault.
• Gambling oddsmaker Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder used to be a fixture on CBS Sports' The NFL Today, but during an interview with a local TV station in Washington on Martin Luther King Day 1988, he opined that black players were better athletes overall since slave owners had deliberately bred some of their slaves for better physical characteristics. While there is some truth in this, Snyder came across as horribly insensitive by asserting this so blithely (especially on that particular holiday), and he was fired, never to return to the public eye in his remaining eight years.
• In 2015 Scott McIntyre, a sports reporter for the Australian public broadcaster SBS, fired off a tweet about ANZAC Day in which he called the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki "the largest terrorist attack in history" and made generalised statements about ANZAC Day being built around "poorly-read white nationalist gamblers and drunks". He was immediately sacked by the conservative government.
• ESPN fired baseball analyst and anchor Adnan Virk in February 2019 after he leaked confidential information about contract negotiations between the sports network and Major League Baseball.
• In 2011, country singer Hank Williams Jr. made a comment on Fox News's Fox & Friends comparing Barack Obama to Hitler. His partnership with ESPN's Monday Night Football ended immediately, and it wouldn't be until six years later after Obama had left office, that Williams and his song "All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight" eventually returned to the program's broadcasts until being retired again before the 2020 season.
• Steve Lyons was fired by Fox Sports due to what was perceived to be racially insensitive comments he made during Game 3 of the 2006 American League Championship Series. When Lyons' broadcast colleague Lou Piniella used an analogy about finding a wallet, he spoke briefly in Spanish. Lyons said Piniella was "hablaing Español" – Spanglish for "speaking Spanish" – and added, "I still can't find my wallet. I don't understand him, and I don't want to sit close to him now."
• Rich Gaenzler was let go from his duties as on-air host for the NHL's Buffalo Sabres and the Buffalo Bandits lacrosse team stadium in March 2021 after an exchange on radio station 97 Rock involving him and two of his co-hosts, Rob Lederman and Chris Klein, with one of them making racially insensitive comments towards Serena Williams, comparing her and other Black women to settings on a toaster.
• Former NBA player Paul Pierce was forced to leave his role as an analyst for ESPN shows NBA Countdown and The Jump after he live-streamed a video on Instagram in which he smoked a blunt while a half-naked woman who wasn't his wife twerked in the background.
• On July 4, 2021, a video was leaked showing Rachel Nichols, the host of ESPN's basketball discussion program The Jump, making disparaging comments about her colleague Maria Taylor, suggesting that Taylor (who is black) had secured her hosting duties for the previous year's NBA Finals at the expense of Nichols (who is white) on account of Taylor's race. The video (which was inadvertently fed to ESPN's control room by a live camera in Nichols' hotel room) reportedly set off internal strife within the network, with some of the on-air talent siding with Taylor and calling out ESPN executives for refusing to discipline Nichols. Unlike most examples in this section, Nichols wasn't immediately let go by the network, and she even issued an apology to Taylor on The Jump the next day, but a few days after The New York Times publicized the video, ESPN announced that she would be removed from sideline coverage of the 2021 NBA Finals and from hosting NBA Countdown, with her sideline duties being taken over by Malika Andrews. Taylor would leave ESPN for NBC after the Finals ended.^note Due to her and ESPN being unable to reach an agreement on a new contract—-Taylor's contract expired on July 20, 2021, the night of Game 6 of the NBA Finals (had the series reached a seventh game, Taylor would have stayed on until after that game ended). On August 25, 2021, ESPN announced that The Jump would be cancelled and Nichols would be removed from all NBA-related programming entirely, and on January 4, 2022, six months after the video was initially leaked, Nichols reached a settlement agreement with the network, officially and effectively ending her tenure with ESPN.
• ABC removed Howard Cosell from his scheduled broadcasting duties for the 1985 World Series alongside Al Michaels and Jim Palmer after the network got wind of the inflammatory content that was in his upcoming book I Never Played the Game. ABC immediately replaced Cosell in the booth with Tim McCarver.
• On January 3, 2022, MLB reporter Ken Rosenthal was let go from one of his jobs at MLB Network. While he was officially let go because his contract with the network expired, many felt that it was due to Rosenthal writing an article for the online news outlet The Athletic (where Rosenthal also works), in which he criticized MLB commissioner Rob Manfred's handling of the COVID-19-shortened 2020 MLB season.
• Simon Reed and Nicky Slater, figure skating commentators for British Eurosport, caused a bit of controversy during the 2022 World Figure Skating Championships after they were caught calling former pair skater and two-time World Champion Meagan Duhamel a "bitch from Canada" on a hot mic at the end of the pairs' short program broadcast. While their commentary has always been rather controversial, this was evidently the final straw for many people, and the ISU subsequently fired both of them from covering the championships, replacing them with Ted Barton. Reed and Slater, for their part, apologized to Duhamel, which she accepted.
• Fox Sports Australia presenter Tom Morris was sacked in March 2022 after leaked WhatsApp audio showed him making sexist and homophobic comments toward a female colleague, reporter Megan Barnard.
• On December 5, 2022, Dan McLaughlin, the longtime TV voice for the St. Louis Cardinals, was arrested for driving while intoxicated. While the incident alone was bad enough, it was McLaughlin's third instance of getting arrested for driving under the influence, with the two previous cases coming in 2010 and 2011. About a week later, McLaughlin and his employer, Bally Sports Midwest, mutually parted ways.
• On December 14, 2022, longtime Buffalo sportswriter Jerry Sullivan was let go from his jobs at the Niagara Gazette and Lockport Union Sun & Journal newspapers as well as WIVB-TV for comments that he made on a local podcast that discusses the NFL's Bills.^note Sullivan was already in hot water with Bills fans because he openly stated to Bills quarterback Josh Allen that the team didn't have a "Super Bowl-worthy offense" during a press conference (which was mind-boggling on its own, considering that the Bills were one of the NFL's best teams in the 2022 season). During the podcast, a woman (who was a Bills fan) criticized Sullivan's appearance on the podcast, and Sullivan responded by saying that women "don't understand critical journalism, they're all wannabe cheerleaders" and that "they don't get it as fans," leading to his exit.
• On April 26, 2023, ESPN fired MLB reporter Marly Rivera after a video of her getting into an argument with fellow MLB reporter Ivon Gaete had surfaced. The two had argued over who got to interview New York Yankees superstar Aaron Judge, with Rivera stating that she had requested an interview with Judge before Gaete did. The argument between the two women got heated to the point where Rivera called Gaete (who is the wife of an MLB executive) a "cunt", leading to her exit.
• On May 22, 2023, longtime TV play-by-play voice of the Oakland Athletics, Glen Kuiper, was let go from that position due to uttering the N-word during an A's game in Kansas City, Missouri earlier in the month. Unlike the Thom Brennaman example above,^note which also took place in Kansas City this appeared to be more of a slip of the tongue, as Kuiper was originally discussing a previous visit to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum (which is located in Kansas City). Kuiper later apologized, but the A's and NBC Sports California weren't as forgiving, leading to his exit.

Related personnel

• The Vancouver Canucks fired their then-National Anthem singer Mark Donnelly in December 2020 after he made plans to sing at an anti-mask rally during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• In 2020, Tokyo Olympics chief Yoshiro Mori was forced to resign from his post after widespread backlash to sexist remarks.
• Five days before the opening of the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, musician Keigo "Cornelius" Oyamada resigned as the composer for the opening ceremony after old interviews resurfaced where he confessed to assaulting and bullying his disabled classmates in the past.
  • Likewise, a day before the opening, Kentaro Kobayashi, who was in charge of the ceremonies, got fired after it was revealed that he had made jokes about the Holocaust.
• The New York Yankees dropped their longtime "God Bless America" singer Ronan Tynan in October 2009 after the latter made an anti-Semitic joke to real estate agent Gabrielle Gold-von Simson, who was searching for an apartment on Tynan's floor.

E-sports

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

• In 2014, dozens of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive pros were caught up in a sudden influx of VAC^note Valve Anticheat, the game's proprietary auto-ban system bans after they were found guilty of cheating, most prominently Simon "⁠smn⁠" Beck of ALTERNATE and Hovik "⁠KQLY⁠" Tovmassian of Titan eSports (while there is no definitive proof of them cheating at actual LAN events, KQLY⁠ admitted to using cheats in public servers). With a VAC ban comes a permanent ban from any Valve-sponsored Major tournaments, and both players were dismissed from their teams shortly after they were issued.
• In 2015, heavy favorite team iBUYPOWER was ousted for matchfixing, having intentionally thrown a game against the team NetcodeGuides.com the previous year. Four of the five involved iBP players and three additional orchestrators of the fix were banned permanently from all Valve-sponsored events (the Sole Survivor of the team being Tyler "Skadoodle" Latham), as well as banned from all ESL and ESEA games. While ESL lifted the ban of their events in 2017, Valve remained steadfast in their decision, at least until late 2023 when Joshua "steel" Nissan announced that he would become eligible again to play on January 2025, 10 years after Valve's initial ruling.
• Nikhil "forsaken" Kumawat ended up torpedoing his professional career after he was found using an aimbot during a LAN event in October 2018, capping off a history of shady play in the prior months. This controversy not only saw him getting banned from the scene, it also caused the disbanding of the nascent OpTic Gaming India team, which in turn is widely seen to have sunk the credibility of India as a burgeoning esports region (OpTic Gaming's India team was formed only in June that year and seen as the first major foray from a western organization into the country's developing scene — with forsaken being ousted on such an egregious cheating offense, it seemed the entire country became plagued with risk and spooked everyone away).
• Starting in August 2020, a massive coaching scandal erupted after it was discovered that many were using a bug in the game's spectator mode that allowed them to cheat by seeing more of the map and enemy teams than intended. Following an investigation by the Esports Integrity Commission, 37 coaches were banned everywhere between 4 to 36 months for exploiting the bug during ESL and Dreamhack competitions.
  • Tied to the spectator bug scandal is an even greater ongoing betting and match-fixing scandal being investigated by ESIC. In January 2021, 35 players in Australia were additionally banned for up to 5 years for participating in match-fixing, with further investigations in North American and European leagues being underway.
  • Coach Nicolai "HUNDEN" Petersen was already caught up in the 2020 coaching scandal mentioned above, having been repeatedly banned from Valve Majors due to his use of the exploiting of the spectator bug, but the final straw for Heroic — the Danish team he was coaching for at the time — came in July 2021 after the organization found him allegedly leaking their strategies to competitors. While Heroic initially fought to keep him around to ride out the initial bans, this breach of trust led them to immediately terminate his contract, and it also caused ESIC to do their own confirming investigation that resulted in an additional 2-year coaching ban. His attempt to take his players with him by claiming they were colluding in the cheats prompted an investigation that prompted very little change — the only player who was deemed remotely complicit, Nikolaj "niko" Kristensen, got a plea deal and received no ban.
• Matthew "Sadokist" Trivett was one of the most recognizable casters in professional CS. His career suffered a blow due to him drunkenly spewing racial slurs and telling a community member to kill himself during a Twitch stream, but he was able to slowly work his way back into the scene and rebuild his standing. However, all of this came crashing down five days into the IEM Rio de Janeiro Major, when he, again under the influence, caused an altercation in the players' hotel, during which he threw an object at a camera crew and smashed a TV, resulting in police being called. This incident prompted ESL (the tournament's organizer) to fire him from the broadcasting team and he has done little in the professional CS scene ever since.

Dota 2

• Two days into the group stage of the 2016 Shanghai Major (and a week before the main event), James "2GD" Harding was sacked from his hosting job due to his off-color on-air antics, from dropping the C-bomb to making jokes about masturbation and government censorship/surveillance. Valve president Gabe Newell claimed that Harding already had a fraught relationship with the company for similar antics at previous events, and while many pushed to give him another chance, the event was seen as the last straw. The entire production crew of the Major was also fired alongside him for undisclosed reasons.
• Professional player Carlo "KuKu" Palad was banned twice over from participating in the Chongqing Major tournament in January 2019 following an incident of him using a slur against the Chinese in a public match. Once the incident spread around the Chinese Dota scene, the Chongqing government barred him from attending (they didn't strictly ban him, but his team, TNC Predator, was reportedly told by event organizers that they couldn't guarantee his safety if he showed up), then Valve formally stepped and properly banned him from the Major.
• Several longtime Dota 2 shoutcasters saw their careers screech to a halt in June 2020 following highly-publicized allegations of sexual assault:
  • Grant "GranDGranT" Harris was ousted for engaging in multiple instances of inappropriate behavior with several industry personalities, including getting into a private legal battle with caster LlamaDownUnder over a restraining order. His sponsorship with organization Evil Geniuses ended immediately, and he quickly announced his indefinite retirement from the esports scene.
  • In direct response to the above controversy, Toby "TobiWan" Dawson completely halted his career as after attempting to side with the abused, he was then also ousted for multiple instances of sexual harassment, with him soon confessing to the multiple levied claims of unwanted and forceful sexual advances onto several women. Several of his former caster partners publicly disowned him, Valve severed connections with him (including scrubbing his in-game voice lines from the TI 10 Battle Pass), and following a final apology post on his Twitter, he himself has completely disappeared from esports and the internet at large.

League of Legends

• The entirety of the short-lived Korean League of Legends team Team Dark was permanently banned from competitive play in 2014 for poor sportsmanship during the 2014 Winter Qualifiers. Before their debut match, their starting midlaner, Jeong "Apdo" Sang-gil, was permanently banned from the game for elo-boosting, and after the rest of the team were matched up against Samsung Galaxy Ozone, they unanimously surrendered at the 20-minute mark where it was available for the first match, and decided to throw their second match entirely, picking poor champions, camping in base, and ending up with the shortest professional League game at 8 minutes.
• Racist comments by one of the shareholders of esports organization Echo Fox (formed in 2015 by Rick Fox) led not merely to the end of his co-ownership position, but the entire organization itself. Specifically, shareholder Amit Raizada was ousted in 2019 for making several racist slurs against Fox and former CEO Jace Hall, prompting an investigation by Riot Games and an ultimatum that Raizada needed to be gone within 60 days, otherwise Echo Fox would be forced to sell their spot. Despite Rick Fox's threats of resignation and attempts to rid of Raizada, he simply couldn't be budged — as claimed by one mutual associate and even Rick Fox himself, Raizada had effectively held Echo Fox hostage, with the organization unable to buy out his shares. After the period passed, Echo Fox was forced to leave the League Championship Series in September 2019, completely dissolving a few months later.
• The Korean professional League of Legends team Griffin went from being one of the Korean league's most promising forces in 2019 to abruptly imploding by 2020 due to a tangled mess of alleged misdemeanors. Conflict first started with the abrupt departure of team coach Kim "cvMax" Dae-ho just a week before Worlds 2019 for unknown reasons (especially shocking since he had often been attributed to the team's success). During Worlds, however, several players of Griffin spoke up during an interview accusing him of "spreading lies" and "talking falsely about the team," which ended up prompting a very messy series of back-and-forth allegations, some of which remain disputed but factored into their eventual punishments:
  • cvMax's claim following Worlds was that he was let go due to personal conflicts with the team director, Cho Gyu-nam, accusing Cho of firing him out of a belief that he was unnecessary to the team, as well as nepotism based on the inclusion of the player Choi "Sword" Sung-won, who cvMax didn't believe was on par with the rest of the team. Things became even more heated when he revealed that the players were under "slave contracts" that gave Griffin a draconian level of control over them, allowing them to end their careers for even the smallest reasons, then sabotage them should they be fired or attempt to leave of their own volition (including siphoning any earnings made should they attempt to profit off their association with the team and blocking them from joining any other teams for 12 months). This was seen as an especially severe problem due to one of the players, Seo "Kanavi" Jin-hyeok, being a minor when he was brought onto the team, bringing to light that Griffin had strong-armed his parents into signing it by misrepresenting what it entailed.
  • Cho responded to the claims by also alleging that cvMax had been mentally and physically abusive towards his players, presenting claims of chronic namecalling, strangling a player, and threatening to kill Sword (a story which Sword has repeatedly backed up). cvMax denied these accusations, though he did admit that he did subject them to a harsher style of coaching and claimed that the players had consented to it.
  • These claims prompted Riot Korea, KeSPA, and even the Korean senate to launch investigations. After all the dust had settled, Kanavi's contract was deemed fraudulent, Griffin was severely fined and forced to change management for willfully forcing him into it, and both Cho and cvMax were found guilty of wrongdoing, with Riot suspending both of them indefinitely from all Riot Games competitions. While cvMax's immediate suspension was undone as he was protected by Korean whistleblower laws (he moved onto coaching DRX in 2020), he was still subject to a third-party investigation which found him guilty of the abuse allegations at the end of 2020, prompting a true 5-month suspension. Meanwhile, all the Griffin players (sans Sword) chose to depart from the team, and after its new roster underperformed throughout the 2020 season, they officially dissolved in early 2021.
• The Chinese League of Legends esports scene found itself caught in a massive match-fixing scandal that blew up in February 2021 after Zhou "Bo" Yang-Bo of FunPlus Phoenix confessed to league officials that he was coerced into match-fixing while in a previous team, prompting a widescale investigation so serious that the LDL had to be postponed indefinitely until its conclusion. In April, 38 individuals (players, coaches, and managers) across 17 teams in the country's major LPL and secondary LDL leagues were found to be involved in fixes, with punishments ranging from 3-month suspensions (which is what Bo received) to lifetime bans which were handed out to 6 players, 3 coaches, and 3 managers.
• Mitch "Krepo" Voorspoels (professional League of Legends player-turned caster for the EU LCS^note Now known as the LEC) stepped down from his role in 2017 after several explicit photos of him were leaked online. After subsequently disappearing from social media, he resurfaced only in early 2021 to publicly consider returning to the scene, though nothing has since come of this.
• Zhang "Peter Zhang" Yi — longtime coach of Team SoloMid — was fired in March 2022 following an internal investigation over "very serious allegations of conflict of interest and unethical practices". While TSM refrained from directly commenting on the matters, a report by Dextero and comments by former TSM personnel claim that he had been surreptitiously taking money from players, including an incident where he helped former support player Hu "SwordArt" Shuo-Chieh sell his car when he was moving back to China, but then pocketed the resulting $80,000 for himself (Zhang claimed it was a loan to cover a family medical emergency, though several players and affiliated talent allege that Zhang approached them asking to borrow similarly exorbitant amounts of money for different reasons). Zhang was also accused of secretly using his coaching position to broker the inclusion of certain Chinese and Taiwanese players, taking a proportion of their earnings as if he were also doubling as an international agent.
• Kim "Clid" Tae-min — then of LCK team Hanwha Life Esports — was hit with numerous sexual harassment allegations from as early as June 2023, leading to an investigation by Riot and the LCK. He was eventually found guilty of sending several inappropriate and explicit DMs to female fans, including a minor, and was given an immediate 12-month suspension from all professional play in September 2023.

Overwatch

• The Boston Uprising of the Overwatch League had two near-identical scandals hit their roster within two years of each other.
  • Jonathan "DreamKazper" Sanchez was regarded as one of the best players in OWL's first season, and on 7 April 2018, the Uprising completed a 4-0 sweep of the Houston Outlaws (whose roster boasted Jiri "LiNkzr" Masalin, regarded as the league's best counter-sniper). Two days later, he was accused of sexual misconduct and grooming by an underage girl, and his contract with the Uprising was terminated. As he was never legally charged, he later made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to return to the Overwatch competitive ladder, being greeted with hostility each time, and he has largely disappeared since then.
  • For the 2020 OWL season, off-tank Walid "Mouffin" Bassal was promoted from the Uprising Academy team, and although they struggled in their early games, Bassal showed signs of promise. However, once again, allegations of sexual impropriety with underage fans were filed against him, and the Uprising terminated his contract on 4 April, almost two years to the day after parting ways with DreamKazper. He has since vanished from the competitive gaming scene.
• Daniel "dafran" Francesca — former Overwatch League player-turned-streamer — was re-signed by his former team, Atlanta Reign, as a content creator in October 2022. This decision was reversed within three hours of the announcement following immense social media backlash, primarily motivated by previous statements he made during Sinatraa's sexual assault scandal (mentioned below), having attacked his accuser while insinuating her claims to be fabrications.
• Félix "xQc" Lengyel, a tank player known for his dominance on Winston, debuted for the Dallas Fuel in the Overwatch League's inaugural season, but following repeated toxic behavior against other players and personnel, including homophobic remarks directed towards Muma of the Houston Outlaws, he was twice suspended before being released entirely from the League two stages in. He has since not returned to esports, instead focusing on his lucrative streaming career.

Street Fighter

• In June 2020, professional fighting game player, Christopher "NYChrisG" Gonzalez, was let go from the big contract he had with top eSports sponsor Evil Geniuses after tweets he made from 2017 resurfaced where he made racist and sexist comments against black female gamers in the fighting game community.
• On January 6, 2021, Ryan "Gootecks" Gutierrez, a once popular and beloved member of the FGC and pro Street Fighter player got his famous "PogChamp" emote removed from Twitch after making posts on the internet supporting the riot and infiltration of the U.S Capitol building in Washington D.C by Donald Trump supporters trying to stop the election certification of president-elect Joe Biden. At that point, Gootecks had already become a pariah in the FGC for his endorsement of QAnon and propagation of COVID-19-related conspiracy theories. The emote was returned to Twitch a short time later, but instead of Gootecks, the emote showed various people making the "PogChamp" face. Eventually, a community vote turned the emote into an alias of "KomodoHype". The emote, as well as the original Pogchamp gif, still remains popular on Discord, however.
• Brazilian player Robson "robinho" Oliveira was banned from all Capcom owned/operated events in 2022 after graphically confessing on stream to participating in a gang rape.
• In May 2022, Seon-woo "Infiltration" Lee was banned from all major FGC tournaments and events, including Combo Breaker, CEO, EVO, and the Capcom Pro Tour. The reasons range from fixing the bracket in tournaments to a Twitch stream he did where he argued he should be allowed to have N-Word Privileges (which also got him banned on Twitch, though he was quickly unbanned from the site), and a domestic violence case with his ex-wife, the latter of which had led to many tournament organizers not wanting to associate with him anyway.
• Ryan "Filipino Champ" Ramirez became the third player in 2020 to get the Capcom banhammer after he made a racist joke on Twitter in June that quickly earned him several bans from independent events. After making a fairly unconvincing apology, he then proceeded to attack another player who thanked the tournament organizers for taking action, and Capcom personally stepped in after that and handed Ramirez a lifetime ban from officially sponsored events. According to Ramirez, the real reason why Capcom banned him was due to him streaming an early build of Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite. His ban from Capcom events has since been lifted.
• Professional player Dalauan "LowTierGod" Sparrow was already widely hated by the fighting game community for being a generally toxic player who regularly engaged in online ragequits, along with his poor sportsmanship and constant beefs, but he had done nothing ban-worthy and thus kept turning up to tournaments and events. This changed in April 2020 when he was outed for quitting a match with fellow player Christina "CeroBlast" Tran and making numerous homophobic and transphobic comments related to Tran's pre-op transgender status on a stream. This earned Sparrow a lifetime ban from all Capcom-sponsored competitive events. Almost immediately after he was banned, Sparrow himself posted a video of Tran repeatedly using the N-word on a stream, which earned them a lifetime ban of their own. Tran later apologized for their actions and was unbanned in May 2021.
• In January 2023, Arturo "NYCFurby" Sanchez, a long-time pro Street Fighter player, event organizer, and one of the most respected people in the FGC, was let go by his employer Team Sp00ky and his partnership with Matcherino after allegations that he wasn't paying the players who placed top 3 in the pot bonus at the end of FGC tournaments he helped organize, and was pocketing a percentage of the money for himself. He returned to streaming and hosting events when Street Fighter 6 released, but vanished without a trace after player Kevin "Dieminion" Landon revealed that Arturo ripped off $5000 from Landon for a PC that Arturo never delivered.

Super Smash Bros.

• Former professional player Zack "CaptainZack" Lauth has been the focal point of numerous controversies within the competitive Super Smash Bros. scene:
  • In 2019, professional player Elliot "Ally" Carroza announced that he would retire from competitive gaming after he admitted to having an affair with Lauth, who had been underage at the time of the relationship. Shortly after this announcement, several major tournament organizations reinforced his self-imposed retirement with a lifetime ban.
  • Lauth later admitted to having not only pressured Carroza into the relationship but also blackmailed him into throwing sets at 2GG: Prime Saga and Momocon 2019. As a result, Lauth's sponsor dropped him, and 2GG would permanently ban him from attending their tournaments. Lauth has not competed since, his last tournament being EVO in August 2019.
  • Ultimately, in late October 2020, Lauth would be permanently banned from his local scene in Louisiana due to his rape of fellow player Nairoby "Nairo" Quezada.
• Things get very complicated when it comes to the case of Nairoby "Nairo" Quezada, a long-standing top player who had been active ever since Brawl. While Quezada himself was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing, his hasty admission led to him suffering consequences, and several others were banned in the ensuing fallout:
  • On July 1st, 2020, Quezada was accused by Zack Lauth of engaging in sexual intercourse with him at the age of 15 while Quezada was 20, and that Quezada had paid him to keep quiet about it. This came out around the same time as dozens of sexual abuse allegations against people within the competitive Smash community, many of which involved minors. Quezada would later seemingly admit to the act on Twitter. Afterwards, many other high-profile players condemned and severed ties with him, he was banned from Twitch, and he was let go from NRG Esports. In response, Nintendo of America themselves marked a documentary ^note This link leads to a reupload of said video that featured him from their YouTube channel as private. With a majority of the community turned against him, it seemed unlikely that he would ever return to the competitive scene.
  • Things took a turn for the bizarre in mid-September 2020, however, when former top player Tamim "Mistake" Omary, one of Lauth's closest friends, released a statement that not only alleged that Lauth had taken advantage of Quezada while the latter was asleep, but that Lauth's claim that Quezada had bribed him was completely false. In response, Lauth would confirm that he had lied about the bribes but remained mum on the first charge. Soon after, in late October 2020, Quezada himself released his own statement recanting his previous admission, which corroborated with Omary's version of events. After Quezada's statement, Lauth was permanently banned from his local scene in Louisiana. Going even further down the Bizarre Bypass, Quezada released a video statement in February 2021 appearing to quash Lauth's allegations, stating that he and Lauth had reached a legal agreement. While the majority of the Smash community reacted with approval and issued apologies for their hasty reactions, Twitch and NRG Esports have shown no interest in taking him back. As of April 2021, Quezada has returned to streaming, albeit on YouTube. However, his career as a competitor is effectively done because of his Twitch ban, due to their rules about featuring banned streamers on the platform ^note A channel that features a banned streamer in any physical capacity (i.e.: on-camera appearances and/or voice call) runs the risk of being banned themselves.
  • Saleem "Salem" Young, another top-level Ultimate player, was implicated in the Quezada/Lauth situation as through Lauth's statement, the community discovered that Young had encouraged Lauth to proceed with sexual contact. Young released a statement defending himself that was met with criticism due to its lack of focus, before later releasing another, more clear statement where he claimed ignorance of Quezada's age at the time. Ultimately, Young would be banned for his complicity in March 2021.
  • Ezra "Samsora" Morris, the second-best Ultimate player in the world at the time, was accused by Omary in the latter's statement of conspiring with Lauth to bring down Quezada out of jealousy. Though Morris would deny the allegations, Young's second statement contained a message of Morris attempting to conceal information about his involvement in the Quezada/Lauth situation. Morris would eventually be banned in early April 2021.
• The Western Smash Bros. competitive community was hit hard with several allegations and bans from late June and continuing throughout early July of that same year. During that period, many Smash players and commentators of varying popularity were hit with allegations of having perpetrated many vile acts over many years, ranging from bullying, sexual assault, pedophilia, and even rape. Aside from Nairoby "Nairo" Quezada (who ultimately got his name cleared), other well-known figures accused were D'Ron 'D1' Maingrette, a very popular commentator who is often credited with helping the Smash community grow in its early years, Gonzalo "ZeRo" Barrios, the best pro player of Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo Wii U and a popular content creator in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and Cinnamon "Cinnpie" Dunson, a popular cosplayer, commentator, and rising Smash community star. These people, among many others, lost their sponsorships and were banned from attending future major Smash events, and the reputation of the Western Smash Bros. community was irreparably tarnished in the eyes of many. Barrios would later engage in a lawsuit meant to clear his name, but time will tell whether or not this will mark his comeback.

Valorant

• Joseph "Silent" Oliver was exposed in June 2021 for impersonating a member of FaZe Clan in a scheme to keep his amateur team together. Teammate V1C played both competitive Valorant and Counter Strike: Global Offensive, and Silent feared he could leave the team to focus on the latter. Silent thus forged a DM conversation between himself and infamous, the manager of FaZe's Valorant team, claiming that their team was a candidate for becoming FaZe's academy team. This made V1C retire from his CS:GO team under the false impression that he had secured a more lucrative future in Valorant, and Silent kept the ruse going for several weeks, going as far as to claim that infamous wanted another teammate he disliked removed from the team until coach tdawgg personally reached out to infamous, who confirmed that he has never interacted with Silent. Silent was immediately kicked from the team and vanished from the competitive Valorant scene shortly afterwards.
• The entire former roster of Singaporean Valorant team Resurgence (which disbanded in late 2020) was suspended in June 2021 from all competitive play after it was discovered that two of its players — Malcolm "germsg" Chung and Ryan "Dreamycsgo" Tan — were guilty of match-fixing against their own team, as well as attempting to get the rest of their team on it (germsg was reported to have gone so far as to attempt bribing his teammates when they refused). The two received a hefty 3-year ban from the scene, while the rest were given lighter suspensions (between 6 months to a year) for being fully aware of the fix but never reporting it.
• The Turkish esports scene found itself facing a reckoning in late 2021 after a massive Twitch leak inadvertently revealed a national money laundering scheme^note The most publicized leaked detail was the payouts of millions of streamers, leading to several people to notice low-viewership Turkish streamers amassing disproportionately high amounts of donations, with hundreds of individuals using the streaming and donation platforms to covertly transfer money attained from credit card fraud. As a direct result of this, BBL Esports released several players from its main and academy-level teams who had all been implicated in the scandal.
• Within Valorant Game Changers — a supplementary competitive series as part of the Valorant Champions Tour focused on women and other marginalized genders — players Alex "Dsylexic" Luong and Jennifer "nabiichu" Choe were caught violating the series' gender eligibility requirements during the inaugural 2022 season. Their team, EQ Cerise, were already disqualified after Dsylexic was discovered using cheating software during a match, and upon further investigation, it was determined that Dsylexic had conspired with nabiichu to allow him to participate in the tournament by listing him as non-binary in spite of otherwise identifying as a cisgender male. Following the competitive ruling from Riot, nabiichu was banned from all competitive Valorant play for five years, and Dsylexic was banned for eight.
• Also from Valorant Game Changers, the team Noot Noot was disqualified after their gameplay tripped off Riot Vanguard (the game's anti-cheat software) during their matches in the 2023 qualifiers, with Madelyn "malibu" Campos in specific ending up under scrutiny for potential cheating, as she had faced warnings and a hardware ban over cheating concerns in the past. In the following investigation, it was determined that malibu and fellow teammate James "summertime" Edwards had circumvented Riot's tournament verification process by providing them with false information, including submitted an AI-generated picture to represent malibu. As a result, summertime received a 1-year suspension from competitive play, but malibu received a permanent ban from participating in any Riot-sanctioned competition entirely.

Other games

• Kurt "Kurt0411" Fenech, former pro FIFA esports player managed to get banned by Electronic Arts a whopping three times over, all on separate occasions, with increasing severity each time, and all largely based on his virulent hostility towards EA regarding their handling of the game.
  • In October 2018, just shy of his tournament's completion, he was suspended for 2 months for "launching personal attacks" at developers and other players.
  • In November 2019, he was officially banned from competing in any EA-sponsored tournaments following a live incident on stream where —during another one of his anti-EA tirades— he angrily spit on an EA scarf.
  • In February 2020, following a video on his personal YouTube where he directly called out and insulted EA community managers and other employees by name, EA deleted his FIFA account and permanently banned him from playing any of their games and accessing any of their services.
• Professional Call of Duty player Carl Riemer was fired by his team and suspended from Twitch after accidentally firing a gun during a livestream after he'd been messing around with it for a few seconds. Careful examination of the video reveals that he'd ejected the round in the chamber, but didn't eject the magazine until afterward, meaning another bullet was automatically inserted. He immediately took full responsibility for the incident and urged all his followers to learn from his example of how quickly lives can be destroyed by reckless gun usage.
• In April 2021, Matthew "Okward1HP" Smedley, coach of Parabellum Esports' Rainbow Six Siege team, was suspended by the organization after they received a private report about him that prompted an investigation, with him voluntarily leaving the organization and the scene entirely the day after. Not long after, it was revealed that the report was filed by a minor to whom he'd repeatedly sent sexually inappropriate messages in private conversations.
• Starcraft's Korean scene was hit with a match-fixing scandal in 2010. Of the 11 players that were banned for life, fined, and sentenced to probation, five of them belonged to the team hite SPARKYZ—including Won "Justin" Jong Seo, one of the ringleaders—and the remnants of the team were forced to merge with CJ Entus.
  • Five years later, the professional Korean Starcraft II scene also ended up engulfed in a massive matchfixing scandal in 2015, resulting in the arrests of a dozen high-profile players and a coach between 2015-16. This not only resulted in lifetime bans from professional Starcraft for most of those involved but some even faced jail time. Among the biggest names involved were Park "Gerrard" Oi Shik, Choi "YoDa" Byung Hyun, Choi "BBoongBBoong" Jong Hyuk, Jung "Bbyong" Woo Yong,^note who, coincidentally, had been part of CJ Entus when the 2010 scandal hit and — perhaps most infamously — acclaimed multi-title champion Lee "Life" Seung Hyun, who was permanently banned, fined, stripped of his titles, and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Multiple games

• The COVID-19 Pandemic had already forced EVO to cancel their 2020 convention and retool it into a more online-centered event. However, in early July 2020, sexual misconduct allegations were leveled against event CEO and co-founder Joey "Mr. Wizard" Cuellar (mostly infamous in recent memory for the Core Values incident during EVO 2019), causing several prominent attendees — ranging from Capcom to the developers of Them's Fightin' Herds Mane6 — to withdraw from the event in protest. As a result, EVO cancelled the event entirely and booted Cuellar from his role in the company shortly afterward.
• Professional esports athlete Jay "sinatraa" Won ended up in a multi-game limbo following public allegations by his ex-girlfriend in 2021 accusing him of serial sexual assault:
  • While he had retired from professional Overwatch by then, the limited-time "Alien" Zarya skin made in commemoration of his 2019 MVP title was scrubbed from the game, with Blizzard issuing refunds to those who purchased it before removing all mentions of its existence from the game.
  • Presently a Valorant pro, he was suspended indefinitely both by his team, Sentinels, and Riot Games during the ongoing investigation. He was given a definitive 6-month suspension following his failure to cooperate — including one incident where he announced on social media that he would publicly provide full evidence for his innocence but then never followed up — and after finding greater success with his replacement, Tyson "TenZ" Ngo, the team confirmed that sinatraa would not be returning once his suspension was lifted.

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