As you probably know by now, former Arkansas basketball player Patrick Beverley has said some pretty volatile things about the incident that led to his departure from the Razorbacks

But it wasn’t just his admission that he cheated on a class paper that got my attention and led to this story, which appears in The Morning News today. It was the fact that he said other teammates had it done as well in an interview on DraftExpress.com.

In case you weren’t aware, here were the words:

“It was some things that happened with me and my team,” Beverley said. “Someone from Arkansas was doing papers, was doing me and some of my teammates’ papers. Basically, instead of ratting my team out, I just said it was just me and I was forced to have a year of ineligibility.”

I heard this quote for the first time about an hour before I spoke with Beverley on Friday. It caught me by surprise. My plan was to write a feature on the former Arkansas guard as he continues to try to work his way into the NBA. I still did that. Was I going to ask him about his departure and see if he was ready to talk more about it for the feature? Of course. But his statement to DraftExpress that other teammates were involved changed the scope of what I was working on in an instant.

So near the end of my interview, I started asking Beverley about the situation and the quote from DraftExpress. He was much more guarded in his response, especially about any former teammates being involved. What he told me was this:

“I definitely don’t want to throw anybody under the bus,” Beverley said. “But people were doing papers. I was given paperwork. Someone wrote a paper and I turned it in. Like I said, I was wrong about that. To this day, I’ll always tell the truth. I stood accountable and told them, ‘Yeah, I turned in a paper that wasn’t mine.’”

I asked him a little more, trying to get him open up about the scope of the situation. Again, he wouldn’t implicate teammates, but said it has been a relief for him to talk openly about his mistakes.

“It’s been like stress relieving, you know what I’m saying?” Beverley said. “A lot of people thought it was because of grades. It really put a dark cloud over me. People took me leaving and took it a lot of other ways. People really didn’t know about what happened except the people that were in the program. It feels real good letting everybody know how it was.”

Clearly, this is a head scratching situation. Allegations of academic fraud are taken very seriously at Arkansas, the Southeastern Conference and the NCAA. Will it lead to an investigation? I don’t know. However, I made Arkansas aware of the comments yesterday and wanted to get their response and their plan of action. Will they look into it further? Do they think others were involved?

This is all they could say yesterday about the situation:

“The university conducted a full and thorough review of the matter and took swift action based on all aspects of its findings,” an athletic department statement read. “While Patrick Beverley is no longer a student-athlete at the University of Arkansas, the university still may not discuss details regarding his departure from the men’s basketball program due to student privacy laws.

“The University of Arkansas remains committed to compliance with all university, Southeastern Conference and NCAA rules and regulations.”

So stay tuned.