Brad Bohannon’s firing as Alabama baseball coach amid a gambling probe Thursday was both sudden and shocking, but it was not without precedent.

Several SEC coaches over the years have seen their tenures come to abrupt endings due to reasons that have little or nothing to do with wins and losses. Many of them were fired, while others chose to resign or were forced to do so.

Below are 11 cases of SEC coaches over the years who have lost their jobs for off-field reasons. This is by no means a comprehensive listing, as compiling such a ledger would test even the nearly infinite bandwidth of both this website and the internet (coaches list in chronological order):

1. Charley Pell, Florida football (1984)

Pell was a standout lineman at Alabama in the early 1960s and a winning football coach at Jacksonville State, Clemson and Florida after that, but ran afoul of the NCAA in a major way prior to his sixth season with the Gators. Pell’s program was accused of an astounding 107 violations, including payments to players and spying on opposing teams’ practice. Pell agreed to resign after the 1984 season, but university president Marshall Criser fired him three games in after the full breadth of the NCAA investigation came to light. Pell never coached in college again, and later became so depressed about his situation that he attempted suicide in 1994. He survived, but died from lung cancer in 2001.

2. Eddie Sutton, Kentucky basketball (1989)

Sutton led Arkansas to eight straight NCAA tournaments before he was hired at Kentucky, and took the Wildcats to the Elite Eight in his first season and the Sweet 16 in his third. Things came crashing down in Year 4, however, as a star player was declared ineligible for possible academic fraud and Kentucky finished with its first losing record since 1927. To make matters worse, a courier company found $1,000 in cash that a representative of Kentucky basketball had sent to a recruit. Threatened with being fired, Sutton resigned shortly after the season ended. He sat out just one year, however, and went to a highly successful 16-year tenure as head coach at Oklahoma State.

3. Wimp Sanderson, Alabama basketball (1992)

Sanderson led Alabama to 10 NCAA tournaments and four SEC tournament titles in his 12 years in Tuscaloosa, with that success and his distinctive plaid jackets and fiery temperament making him among the more high-profile coaches in the country. His tenure ended suddenly in May 1992, though, after his longtime secretary filed a sexual discrimination lawsuit against him and alleged he struck her during an argument two months earlier. Sanderson acknowledged the two had once had a lengthy affair, but denied intentionally hitting her. Nevertheless, Sanderson resigned from Alabama. He later coached five seasons at Arkansas-Little Rock, winning a Sun Belt Conference title and playing in the NIT in 1996.

4. Mike Price, Alabama football (2003)

Price was a somewhat out-of-left-field hire when he was tapped in early 2003 to replace Dennis Franchione at Alabama, but had decent credentials — having twice taken Washington State to the Rose Bowl. It became obvious early on, however, that the veteran coach had no idea what he was getting into. Rumors of Price’s after-hours behavior around Tuscaloosa began to spread, and the situation came to a head after he traveled to a Pro-Am golf tournament in Pensacola, Fla., in April of that year. Price visited a “gentleman’s club” and apparently wound up with one or more of the performers in his hotel room, one of which charged numerous room-service items to his university credit card. After the story surfaced on internet message boards and made the rounds on talk radio, Price was fired in early May without ever having coached a game for the Crimson Tide. He sat out only that one season before being hired at UTEP, where he coached the next nine years.

5. Pokey Chatman, LSU women’s basketball (2007)

A star player at LSU in the 1980s and later a long-time assistant coach, Chatman took the Tigers to the Final Four in each of her first three seasons as head coach after taking over for mentor Sue Gunter. Chatman had another good team in Year 4, but never got to coach in the NCAA tournament. A former assistant coach and teammate reported to LSU officials in February that Chatman had had an inappropriate romantic relationship with at least one former player. Given the opportunity to resign or be placed on administrative lead during an investigation, Chatman stepped down in March. She later coached a year in Russia, and then spent nine seasons as a head coach in the WNBA. She remains an assistant coach in the women’s pro league.

6. Bruce Pearl, Tennessee basketball (2011)

Pearl made the most of his first big-time coaching opportunity, taking the Volunteers to six straight NCAA tournaments — a run that included an Elite Eight appearance and two trips to the Sweet 16. However, the NCAA caught wind of a 2008 incident in which Pearl had hosted a recruit and his family for a cookout at his home during an unofficial visit. Pearl had apparently instructed those in attendance not to tell anyone about the cookout, given that it was against NCAA rules. Confronted by the NCAA, Pearl lied about the incident, and also apparently told the recruit’s father to lie as well. Pearl was not fired immediately, but instead received financial sanctions. However, when additional NCAA violations came to light in March 2011, he was fired. The NCAA later hit Pearl with a three-year show cause order, and he spent the next two seasons as a television analyst. Auburn hired Pearl just as his show-cause was set to expire in March 2014, and he has gone on to even more success in nine seasons with the Tigers, including a pair of SEC regular-season championships, a conference tournament title and a trip to the Final Four in 2019.

7. Sunny Golloway, Auburn baseball (2015)

Golloway was a big-time winner at both Oral Roberts and Oklahoma, highlighted by a trip to the College World Series with the Sooners in 2010. Auburn hired him to revive its moribund program in 2014, and he reached an NCAA Regional in his second season. That would prove to be the end of Golloway’s tenure on the Plains, however, as he was fired in September 2015. Auburn cited 11 violations of his contract in firing him for cause, including allowing players who weren’t medically cleared to work out and practice, and failing to remove camp attendees from the field when there was lightning in the area. Golloway sued for wrongful termination, and later reached an out-of-court settlement with Auburn. After operating a baseball camp for a time in his home state Oklahoma, Golloway was a high school coach for several years. He is now in his first season as head coach at Division II East Central University.

8. Hugh Freeze, Ole Miss football (2017)

Freeze famously returned the Rebels to national prominence, landing a Top 5 recruiting class in 2013 and beating Alabama two straight years in 2014 and 2015. But things began to go sideways shortly after that 2015 season, when the NCAA charged Ole Miss and Freeze with numerous recruiting violations. The investigation dragged into the summer of 2017, when the situation blew up in spectacular fashion. Houston Nutt, Freeze’s predecessor as Rebels coach, filed a defamation lawsuit against the school, alleging that Freeze and athletics director Ross Bjork had intentionally misled reporters that most of the NCAA violations took place during Nutt’s tenure. While investigation the lawsuit, Nutt’s attorney discovered that Freeze had made several calls to an escort service on his university phone. When that information came to light in July 2017, Freeze was forced to resign from Ole Miss. He sat out three seasons before being hired at Liberty, and after four mostly-successful years with the Flames was hired in January as head coach at Auburn.

9. Andy Cannizaro, Mississippi State baseball (2018)

A former Major League Baseball player and scout, Cannizaro spent three seasons as an assistant at LSU before he was hired as head coach at Mississippi State in 2017. Cannizaro led the Bulldogs to 40 wins and an NCAA Super Regional berth in his first season, but would make it only three games into Year 2. He resigned in February 2018, after the Mississippi State administration became aware that Cannizaro — who was married with two children — had engaged in an affair with a former Bulldogs football recruiting assistant — who was also married. Cannizaro later spent four seasons as a high school head coach in Louisiana, but was dismissed at the end of the 2022 season.

10. Jeremy Pruitt, Tennessee football (2021)

Pruitt rose through the ranks of high school football to become defensive coordinator at Florida State, Georgia and Alabama, then took over as head coach at Tennessee in 2018. After three up-and-down seasons with the Volunteers, he was fired in January 2021 after evidence of recruiting and other NCAA violations came to light. Pruitt and several of his assistant coaches and staff members were accused of paying or directing money to recruits (allegedly stuffing cash into fast-food bags, as the most infamous allegation goes) and illegally recruiting during the COVID dead period. The full sanctions have not yet been handed down, though Pruitt remains a pariah in college football. He spent the 2021 season on the staff of the NFL’s New York Giants, but has been out of football since. Pruitt and others from Tennessee met with the NCAA Committee on Infractions in April, so penalties could be announced at any time.

11. Will Wade, LSU basketball (2022)

Rarely has there been more brazen evidence of NCAA violations than that involving Wade, whose voice surfaced on an FBI wiretap in 2019 talking of a “strong-ass offer” given to a former LSU recruit. Wade was suspended after the wiretap came to light, costing him a chance to coach his SEC regular-season championship team in the conference or NCAA tournaments. He was later reinstated, however, and coached three more seasons with the Tigers before university administrators finally believed they had enough evidence to dismiss him — which they did in March 2022. The NCAA investigation remains pending, but that hasn’t stopped Wade from getting another job. He was hired in March at McNeese State, though he’ll start his tenure with a five-game suspension that his new employers hope will placate the NCAA.

Creg Stephenson has worked for AL.com since 2010 and has covered college sports for a variety of publications since 1994. Contact him at cstephenson@al.com or follow him on Twitter at @CregStephenson.