Oh, the violations were ridiculous. One of them was providing athletes an inordinate number of meal tickets for the cafeteria. Another one was the Converse rep giving players too many pairs of shoes. A third was allowing athletes to use the WATS line (remember those?) in the athletic department to call their families back home at night. The most serious charge was paying for a couple of plane tickets so players without cars could go home for Christmas and make it back in time for practice starting back up. Not a single one of them had anything to do with recruiting enticements, or academic fraud, or players' gambling involvement, or paying for girlfriends' medical procedures, or any other of the variety of serious stuff that major programs like North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, UCLA, etc. got/get away with on an annual basis.
This was back when the NCAA wielded a BIG stick; just a couple of years before they gave SMU the death penalty for football violations. The NCAA policy when it came to investigations: if they showed up on your campus, you're toast. They weren't leaving town till they dug up enough dirt to justify their visit (and the expenses that went along with it).
Funny how times have changed...