Due to an athletics scandal, the National Collegiate Athletic Association applied the death penalty to the basketball program at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.

In 1973, the University of Southwestern Louisiana was penalized by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) for rules violations concerning the university's basketball program. This followed an investigation in which the association discovered that the program had been fielding academically ineligible players and paying student athletes, in violation of the NCAA's rules. As a result, the NCAA applied the "death penalty" to the program, barring them from competing for two years, in addition to other forms of punishment that included a probation period and a removal of voting rights in the association.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a nonprofit organization that regulates student athletics among about 1,100 schools in the United States, and 1 in Canada. It also organizes the athletic programs of colleges and helps over 500,000 college student athletes who compete annually in college sports. The headquarters is located in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The death penalty is the popular term for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)'s power to ban a school from competing in a sport for at least one year. This colloquial term compares it with capital punishment since it is the harshest penalty that an NCAA member school can receive, but in fact its effect is only temporary.

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette is a public research university in Lafayette, Louisiana, United States. It has the largest enrollment within the nine-campus University of Louisiana System and the second-largest enrollment in Louisiana, behind only Louisiana State University. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".