Entrance to the University of Mississippi. Photo Credit: Katherine Welles/Shutterstock.com.

The University of Mississippi has announced that general counsel Lee Tyner, who has been with the school since 1998, has resigned to “pursue other opportunities,” just 10 days after the NCAA ruled against the university over football recruiting violations.

He's not the first GC at a university to leave his post in the wake of college athletics controversy.

Tyner's last day at Ole Miss, as it is affectionately called, will be Dec. 31, the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion Ledger newspaper reported Monday. The university said associate GC Perry Sansing will become interim general counsel at the start of 2018, while the school conducts a national search to fill the position.

Tyner, who could not be immediately reached for comment, had served as the university's top legal officer since 2003 after joining the school as an attorney five years earlier. He also regularly taught courses in business law and communications, according to his university bio.

The GC had led the university's defense in the nearly five-year-long investigation by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The NCAA said six football staff members and 12 boosters were involved in the violations, which included giving about $37,000 in cash to prospects, as well as automobiles, lodging, transportation, meals and apparel. Two staff members also helped arrange fraudulent standardized test scores for three prospects.

On Dec. 1, the NCAA announced that the university “lacked institutional control in its football program” and imposed a list of penalties that included three years of probation until Nov. 30, 2020; a financial penalty of $5,000 plus 1 percent of its average football budget for three years, which was calculated at $179,797; and a two-year ban on participating in bowl games.

“Some Ole Miss fans were often critical of the fact the university pursued a path of cooperation during the NCAA process,” the Clarion Ledger article said.

The school said it would appeal the NCAA ruling. “We're appealing this case because we were not given proper due course and we are concerned about that,” Chancellor Jeff Vitter told the newspaper.

Ole Miss is not the first school to shake up its general counsel's office during or after an NCAA investigation.

In September 2017, the NCAA found that Rutgers University had failed to properly monitor its football program resulting in violations. The school has had a series of in-house legal chiefs.

First in 2013, Rutgers replaced general counsel John Wolf, who resigned over his role in a decision to suspend rather than fire a head basketball coach who was found to be abusive to players in practice. The school then named John Farmer Jr., a former New Jersey attorney general and then dean of Rutgers Law School, to the GC post on an interim basis.

In February 2016, after Rutgers had suspended its head football coach for three games in late 2015 over NCAA violations, the school named John Hoffman, then acting attorney general for New Jersey, to the general counsel job.

The University of North Carolina also shook up its GC office during a recently resolved NCAA investigation of an academic scandal at the school that involved athletes. In 2011, a North Carolina newspaper reported on a suspicious “paper” course that many athletes were taking.

The school conducted several internal investigations, with the first one led by Leslie Strohm, then UNC's general counsel. As public outrage continued, the school hired an outside lawyer in 2014 to conduct an independent investigation, and he found “a fundamental failure to conduct sufficient oversight.”

Strohm was replaced by an interim GC in January 2015. And in the fall of 2016 the school named veteran Charlotte attorney Mark Merritt as its new general counsel.

Meanwhile the NCAA launched its own probe of the academic scandal. It concluded in October 2017, finding that, because the lenient classes were also open to regular students, not just athletes, there was no unfair benefit to school athletes, and therefore no violation. But the damage to UNC's reputation had already been done.