“If you see it, you own it,” said McGarity, who took over at his alma mater in August 2010 after serving 18 years as Jeremy Foley’s right-hand man at Florida. “No matter what it is, from a piece of paper on the ground to somebody breaking the rules. If you see it, you own it, and if it is serious you are obligated to report it up the chain of command.”
No doubt he’s sincere. And no doubt he reflects a general consensus among his peers (at least I hope so). But let’s face it – being concerned about a Jerry Sandusky is easy. Nobody wants to be seen as empowering a monster.
But how about turning some of that worry about the chain of command to something a wee bit harder, eh? Something like, oh, say, this.
There’s another college sports scandal largely going unnoticed this summer. It’s not as horrific as Penn State. What could be worse than that?
But North Carolina’s academic scandal is a big deal. And it could be bigger if it becomes attached to Roy Williams’ basketball program.
Concealing the rapes of boys presumably (hopefully!) doesn’t happen often in college sports. Yet a big reason why that duplicity occurred is similar to why large numbers of North Carolina athletes attended bogus classes.
Keep the athlete eligible or a coach/administrator employed. Keep the school’s image intact while trying to win games. Keep printing money through the college sports machine.
I think Solomon’s kidding himself if he thinks Penn State grabbed all the oxygen in the room such that we don’t hear much about what’s unfolding in Chapel Hill. The reality is that academic scandals sprout like weeds in the college football world. Some brief attention may get paid to one thing or another, but they all wind up fading when the weather turns cooler.
But he’s spot on about the rest. Just as much as what we saw at Penn State, academic scandals are about letting athletic departments have too much say over school management. (And just like at Penn State, some of what occurred at North Carolina may violate state criminal laws.)
So, what say you, Mark Emmert and your band of merry men? Is it culture changing time again?
I’m not holding my breath. Like I said, condemning a serial child rapist and those who enabled him isn’t hard. Lifting the curtain to assign blame for college football’s sausage making is. Just ask someone close to us.
Georgia president Michael Adams, a former member of the NCAA’s Executive Committee, has made some unpopular moves concerning athletics in his time at Georgia. He forced former athletics director and Hall of Fame football coach Vince Dooley to retire in 2004. He was the force behind the hiring of basketball coach Jim Harrick, who he later fired due to NCAA violations.
But Adams has shown a zero tolerance approach to coaches or employees who behave badly. When athletics director Damon Evans, Adams’ hand-picked successor to Dooley, was arrested for DUI while with a woman who was not his wife, Adams immediately fired Evans…
Don’t you love the way Barnhart finesses that academic scandal? Sure, Harrick got fired. But does anyone remember that the only people who paid a price for the school turning a blind eye to what Harrick Junior was doing were the basketball players who weren’t allowed to play postseason ball? They got sacrificed on Michael Adams’ altar. But the administrators who allowed the situation to fester suffered not a whit. That’s the approach that makes this quote from McGarity so laughable: “It has to start with presidential leadership. If you have a president who has his priorities in order there is less of a chance that something like this [Penn State] could happen.”
So don’t count on Sheriff Emmert riding out again to clean up our fair town. Child rapists, beware. The rest of you folks undermining college sports? Keep the noise down, or they might have to issue you a citation.
Get The Picture 
You don’t think Harrick and Harrick Jr. paid a price for that little incident? Their careers were ended by it. They thought strongly enough about the price they paid to file a lawsuit later.
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gastri….it wasn’t about the Harricks not getting punished they did… the point was the man who hired them (and broke the rules to do so) did NOT get punished. Coach Adams knew the Harricks were serial NCAA rules violators but hired them anyway. Glossing over that fact in the context of a “if you see it you own it article ” is just total BS. Adams saw the Harricks but he certainly did not own responsibility for their conduct when the NCAA came a knockin.
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But the Senator’s statement was “the only people who paid a price for the school turning a blind eye to what Harrick Junior was doing were the basketball players.” That’s not factually correct.
I agree with your statements re: Adams getting away with it.
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I would argue the Harricks paid a price for their own actions, not for the school’s failure to monitor, but your mileage may vary.
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Ok, I see what you’re saying there.
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That was what sacrificing the innocent basketball players was all about–saving Mike Adams ass. He had to make it appear that as soon as he know anything was amiss he acted. If not he might have been drawn into the vortex. Mike Adams is all about self-promotion and that includes self-preservation.
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I’m glad to see folks at least paying lip service to institutional responsibility, but I am afraid, Senator, I agree on most of your points, although I am not at all sure the NCAA, with the Penn State deal, has not forced itself into a position of being more aggressive than it has been.
While academic fraud is within the NCAA’s purview, it has traditionally been handled by the institution…when the institution can not or does not address the situation, the NCAA has acted.
These things take a long time to work their way through the system (Not in the NCAA sense, but in the wider sport-wide sense. Before Paterno’s perfidy I would have trusted Carolina to handle its situation properly….now I am not so sure.
There is some evidence to indicate the tougher academic standards in college football were, to some extent at least, a result of the Jan Kemp case at Georgia.
(I can’t pass up the opportunity to recall watching a panel on, I guess, ESPN, following the conclusion of the trial where, speaking for college football, more or less, was Joe Paterno…from the moral high ground, of course, polishing his “Success with Honor” spiel.)
Maybe the Penn State horror will have a positive impact on institutional responsibility…I hope football is still alive when the posturing is done.
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From Solomon’s article:
In light of PSU and Freeh’s report, if you were calling the shots at UNC, would you let Emmert have the report produced by your outside review and would you announce in advance of that that you stood behind it?
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In our new and improved perfect world I would do both…but you are, of course, right implying that will never happen.
I seem to remember being told of the existence of a similar report into a similar set of circumstances at a major state university (similar in that it involved academic fraud and the institutionalization of it) in the mid-eighties that not only never saw light of day but was distributed with cyanide pills to a select few.
The argument then against the NCAA involving itself was exactly the same, that the developmental studies program was open to all students.
And a point about that, I don’t know if Carolina’s was that organized, but the Developmental Studies program had been around at Georgia long before it was….ah……redirected?…to be more ah….useful? to athletes. I know this because I was in it, as were a few athletes at that time. (very early 60’s)
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I’m probably gonna catch it for this, but the fact that all those classes (56 of ’em) are in the Afro-American Studies department at UNC may be a substantial reason the situation was allowed to run loose. No politically correct university administrator ( and that’s about all of ’em) would risk the blow back from putting scrutiny on that racially protected duchy. Note that the problem has been going on for at least 6 years. Sean May said he switched majors in 2006.
Still I get a nice schadenfreude seeing it happen to UNC.
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Eh, I think that’s more flavor of the month type stuff. At Auburn it was sociology. It matters more that you find the right kind of professor than the right kind of subject.
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Don’t disagree with you, but still think college types, who specialize in chickens**t to start with, more willingly turn a blind eye to minority studies than sociology.
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Not sure there is blindness in that eye, or true fear over not being PC. It is time for leaders, on campus or otherwise, to be honest. Not doing so has led to your “specialize in CS” viewpoint. We may all wink at those in power who do not have the character of those detailed in John Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage book, but we desperately need some people who have a little backbone in positions of authority in both public and private leadership positions.
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It would help if they didn’t get shredded in the news cycle every time someone made a tough decision.
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+1 Everything has to be a win, or a loss these days. And virtually every writer/anchor/publisher has an agenda.
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One of the reasons I support the NCAA sanctions on PSU so adamantly is because I feel wrong doings should be punished, and it specifically should be dealt with harshly when committed by those in charge of enforcement. My point is made by us now wondering IF we should deal with academic fraud. Of course we should, and the lead should be taken by the educators who, supposedly, are held accountable for the process at UNC. If they don’t take immediate steps, the conference and NCAA should intervene to insure a reasonably level playing field for those who compete against them.
Problems begin when you begin qualifying, or justifying, breaking the rules, you either did, or didn’t. Allowing students to enroll in a school when they do not meet the academic standards of other students is wrong, and always has been. Giving those athletes special consideration, other than timing of class scheduling and allowing make-up tests when traveling to team events, should not be tolerated. Let’s make student athletes be athletes. Will that mean a lesser level of football, sure but the focus will be back on the game and off the police blotters and courtrooms. And the game will still be competitive, and that is what I really want. I loved CFB in the 60s as much as I do today, I just get to see and talk about it more because of technology.
I don’t want to be perceived as naive, I fully understand the economics and difficulty of transforming the game, but once you begin with the concessions and excuses, where do you draw the line? Apparently we are drawing them haphazardly, or not drawing them at all. Let the HS players who just want to play in the NFL and make a ton of money play in a “minor league” or semi-pro league funded by the NFL owners. I will still root for the team representing the Southeast, and UGA will find some good athletes who can play football while maintaining their grades. Trying to fit this round peg into a the square hole, and then allowing for “fudging” of the rules and leads to some very embarrassing situations.
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“..I feel wrongdoings should be punished..” A noble ambition, Mac. I am afraid that you will be disappointed if you place your trust in Mark Emmert. Getting punished by that bunch at the NCAA is arbitrary at best and more like totally random at worst.
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I didn’t say I had high confidence in either Emmert, or the NCAA, at this point but I don’t feel that does not justify setting clear standards and enforcing them. If the current group is incapable of improving, replce them. Sitting on our collective hands and saying it isn’t worth pursuing excellence is just not acceptable to me. Will it have to be taken in steps? Yes, but now that we know what is truly unacceptable to the executive committee why not move forward to cleaning up the mess? “That bunch” may not be the right folks to continue the process but at least they took a stand for a change and have begun the public conversation about UNC, and others.
I will steer out of the murky waters of politics but offer this parallel, we cannot get to where we need to be to regain fiscal control of our debt but setting a goal of spending within our intake of money has to be the starting principle. There can certainly be chaos in the streets if we began cutting muscle and not fat immediately, but directionally there has to be significant changes or we doom the future for many of us and most assuredly the next generation. Forget that as a financial/political argument and apply the thought to CFB, we have a real mess to clean up and steps have to be taken before it gets uncontrollable. I don’t suggest the problems in CFB are anywhere near the difficulty of the US debt problem but they both began by not having consistent controls and have deteriorated to where some are willing to throw up their hands and say the problem is too big to address. So our option is to sit back and watch things gets worse? The past two weeks have given us a glimpse that the NCAA can help enforce standards when the institution is unwilling to step up. Not saying this means they are now effective and we will all marvel at how efficient and well-run they are but we have seen they have some integrity and commitment to protect the product. I am at least encouraged by that.
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Unfortunately I do not share your encouragement. the NCAA ship has sailed. Year after year and president after President have shown the NCAA to be an inept, corrupt and stupid organization. Who needs it anyway? Get the 5 big conferences together and leave. Form your own CAA but call it something like “American Collegiate Athletic Association.” There will be a lot of bitching in the media but as soon as the ball gets kicked off they’ll shut up and after one season is over, with a champion being crowned on the field, the public will collectively say: “Why didn’t this happen years ago?”
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“Let’s make student athletes be athletes.” Did you mean let’s make them be students?
Penn State didn’t elevate the football program all on its own, and it didn’t happen overnight. Just the like the 100,000+ stadiums at schools across the country, college football’s profile has been building for years. We, the fans, have consistently demanded more and more from the football teams of schools across the country. In an attempt to meet that demand schools have, in fits and starts, made ever more tortured compromises. Now we have everything from dozens of websites devoted entirely to the recruitment of high-school athletes, to assistant coaches making seven figures, to billion dollar TV deals and 20 year college athletes with national profiles US Senators would envy. All of this exists under the farcical umbrella of amateur college athletics, as if college football is just college lacrosse but a few more people show up for the games. Why are we surprised it’s constantly beset with scandals? The entire system is predicated on willfully denying its nature.
The emperor has no clothes.
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Sorry, I meant “be student athletes”. I agree this has been an evolutionary process and money is certainly a key factor in pushing it in the wrong direction, I am not so sure the amateur athlete concept is farcical at all. Look at college baseball, golf, gymnastics, tennis, etc.; how many major scandals do you see regarding behavior issues or academics? I am not saying there aren’t occasional problems regarding individual athletes, or programs, but these participants seem to go to class, make their grades and avoid the early morning jail appearance.
The difference between the college lacrosse and college football you cite is not the number of fans that show up but the type of student you admit. I know people who attend more college baseball games a year than they do football, there just aren’t as many, but they are amateurs and play at a pretty high level. How many Georgia baseball players or golfers do you recall being involved in drug arrests, bar fights, DUIs, etc., yet many have the potential and goal to play at the highest level in their sports.
I agree that a legendary, head baseball coach would not have had the clout that Paterno had to influence his superiors to cover up horrendous acts such as the Sandusky case, but that is the exception of what coaches face. Most of the decisions they face involve eligibility and good/bad behavior, and recruiting talent to keep the success going. I submit the reason they have less trouble in the minor sports is because they don’t bring in athletes who lack the discipline and commitment to succeed at a university like UGA. That is “the Pandora’s Box” we should be talking about, not the NCAA over stepping their bounds.
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UGA admits different types of students for football and lacrosse precisely because so many more people show up for football games. What some of these football players lack in discipline and commitment to succeed they make up for in football talent. We as fans demand that. We do not collectively demand that of our golf or our tennis programs. Obviously we have passionate fans of those sports, but we aren’t signing billion dollar deals with ESPN for them to broadcast our golf matches.
College Football’s version of Pandora’s box was opened a long, long time ago and the misfortunes that poured out of it are so well ingrained that we honor them as traditions.
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I understand your point but we may disagree about the necessity of having done so. UGA football fans have always been passionate, and filled the stadium to capacity. You can argue the chicken and egg thingy, but the university enrollment has grown substantially churning out more alums to support school activities. Combined with an increasing population and massive exposure of the product due to an explosion of available TV channels, some dedicated exclusively to sports with lots of airtime to fill, the sport reaches deeper than ever before.
With the inflow of inflated dollars over the decades, who is to say the amounts would be that different? People will watch competitive games, and CFB was competitive before, just as it is now. I wonder if the NFL, which hasn’t changed it’s “entry requirements” hasn’t seen a comparable (or better) increase in dollars. Look at football salaries and the value of teams from the 60s to 2012 and see if there isn’t a correlation to the revenue growth of CFB.
Look, I understand that many want to see the very best players on the field wearing their school’s colors every Saturday of the fall, but we are paying a price for that, and we currently have no choice if we want to be competitive except go the way of the Ivy League and prohibit athletic scholarships.. My contention is that we would be happy with a playing field leveled, even if at a lesser level. There is a lot of ground between intramural football and the current D1 elite.
Many of these athletes would happier getting a modest salary playing in a “minor league” while they developed their talent and dropping the charade of being a college student. And the university could regain their integrity and not bend the rules. Not saying my position is right for everyone, and may not be right at all, but I know I would personally welcome a change from the constant negative publicity and drama as long as I can still look forward to beating Auburn, Florida, and Tennessee every year. And we could, if we all played by the same rules.
OK, off my soap box, I just feel things can be improved by being more intellectually honest about what is happening on campuses all over America, whether publicly known, or not. Keep in mind, it was less than 2 years ago that mouthy fans of tosu, UNC, and PSU were throwing rocks at the SEC schools for being dirty while they were pure. Lot more problems going on than is ever brought to light.
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Both you and Connor are touching solidly the nerve that dictates many of the collective university aberrations formed by CFB popularity and the money it generates. Truly, as fans, we have reponsibility as well when we put pressure on the admin to exceed big and “don’t let my proud school get lost in the big shuffle” . We remain innocently ignorant of what this pressure does to promote activities that admins and coaches parlay into winning teams.
Will we ever come to grips with the ephemeral connection that makes us partially responsible? No, we won’t. Can we do anything to ensure that our passionate enthusiasm for CFB will produce honor and glory to our school? Yep, deep in our hearts I believe we believe so. Besides cheering and letting the team know we are behind them, can we do anything tangible that will correct mistakes that are repeated from one institute to another like a communicable disease that has no cure while we shout and bash those who are caught? You bet your sweet ass we can if there is a common will among alums.
Mac, you and Connor have hit on the subject themes that need extensive examination and push from the rest of us. Shining bright light on processes endemic to the recruiting process would be an achievable start. Academics of our University constitutes a ground that we are quite familiar with and can influence. I humbly propose that a starting point at our University is with the selection of our next President. We can demand that, as head of this institution and it’s alums, a new President will represent a new start to establish that the hierarchy is one of openness for the education of student athletes and will outline the basic courses they are required to pass IN THEIR FIRST TWO YEARS. After that, have a guidance committee set up that will monitor progress in majors leading to graduation. I know, much of this is ostensibly in place and isn’t new, but participation by the President’s Office on down would signal that a culture change would get the impetus needed to succeed.
Yeah, I know that’s a Pollyanna speech, but it’s intent is to support those who bring up these subjects and who support their reasoning with elegant words. Cold water thrown on their attempt to lead by dubbing their clarion call as naive would be exactly what some people at PSU did when others tried to avert disaster. Placing UGA in a leadership position to counter that and other losing cultures in the future would be a good thing started right here.
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“Problems begin when you begin qualifying, or justifying, breaking the rules, you either did, or didn’t.”
Yep, das da facts, Mac.
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You have some serious company in that opinion (from the article):
Bill Friday has preached this point for years. He’s the co-founder of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and the former longtime president of the University of North Carolina System.
“You simply can’t mix running an entertainment industry and running a university. They’re not compatible,” Friday said. “Now we try hard. We offer all kinds of platitudes and say all kinds of things that academic people are supposed to say. But the truth of the matter is the issue is control of the institution and its destiny, and that’s the job of the presidents and chancellors and faculty.”
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there seems to be a inclination to use the penn state situation as the end-all example of what is wrong with college sports. it’s not. the key difference being there isn’t any competitive advantage to be gained by having a child rapist on the staff. the usual litany of excesses college athletics are accused of center around the use of unfair methods to gain advantage on the field. the money (which we assume is the prime motivator of all the actors) is what results from that ugly syllogism. at penn state, the discovery of the offenses was covered up to preserve the program. you have to take the next step in the equation to find the intersection with the former example, the money. but resolving the core problem in the penn state matter — ensuring accountability and transparency that simply didn’t and still does not exist — is completely different than finding the solution to the issue of preserving the sanctity of amateurism in collegiate sports. conflating the two works for awhile but is eventually a doomed endeavor.
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I disagree with your premise that the Penn State deal is not the ultimate example of sports gone wild. The real horror in the Penn State deal not the heinosity of the crime Sandusky committed, but that he was allowed to continue the crime because the institution was more interested in protecting its reputation and program than in carrying out its institutional responsibilities.
Corruption of the system does not necessarily mean competitive advantage, although an argument could be made that Paterno’s “Success with Honor” mantra was a recruiting tool.
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It is bigger than football that so many people at Penn State knew of Sandusky’s issue and enabled him to use the Penn State football connection to lure children. I blame McQueary as much as Penn State. He saw it happen and only reported it to Joe Pa. He didn’t do anything to stop Sandusky once it was evident that Penn State was doing nothing. I hope he is personally penalized and not allowed to coach again. He told his father and his father should have reported it even if his reporting was hearsay. I don’t understand how those men can look in the mirror knowing what they knew. Everyone at Penn State who enabled Sandusky should lose their jobs. We look at the football program but it is bigger than that.
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Not according to Louis Freeh. Or Mark Emmert for that matter.
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I disagree Kleph. Option A was your legendary linebacker-coach / heir apparent resigning in disgrace. Option B was your legendary assistant coach walking away from continued fame and fortune because he so strongly felt the call to help children. “A” would have been a recruiting disaster. “B” was a strong recruiting pitch. I remember the stories when Sandusky walked away. They were glowing. They played a role in the sanctification of Saint Joe and PSU that I think people forget.
Sandusy was the embodiment of the PSU Way – a living symbol of it. They milked that for all it was worth. Knowing that the guy spending all that time around all those children was sent packing because he had molested others.
This wasn’t something PSU people ignored. This was something they helped create. Frankly, I consider Joe an accomplice. That’s the net effect of his actions.
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I’m not so sure the Harrick situation is remotely comparable. Remember, we’re talking about academic fraud only in the technical sense. Junior gave the basketball players an advantage that other students didn’t get (by counting basketball practice for class credit), and he wasn’t allowed to do that. However, the class was about coaching basketball, so if anyone thinks the players got through that class without knowing the material they’re just ignoring the obvious. As to the final exam, it was a fonking PE class for goodness sake. Most of those don’t even have a final. The three-point question just made for a good punchline more than anything else.
The other violation was Harrick paying a $300 phone bill for a piece of crap player of his. Again, wrong, but not exactly a major moral misdeed.
Adams could have easily helped fight this (and he should have given the circumstances that actually happened) but he decided that the PR battle was already lost and he had to destroy the village to save it. If UGA was interested in covering the scandal up (a la the PSU administrators) wouldn’t they have just paid Tony Cole to shut his mouth?
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This is where I lost all respect for Adams. The violations were actually minor and got played in the media to be much worse than they really were. Nevertheless Adams saw this as a threat to himself if things went bad. So, instead of fighting for his school and its BB team (which by the way was pretty damn good) he threw all the innocent players as well as the coaches under the bus and completely destroyed the UGA BB program in so doing. The BB team had finally worked its way up to becoming one of the top programs in the SEC at that time and STILL hasn’t recovered. It is questionable whether it ever will. Mike Adams–POS.
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If the UNC probe turns up the complicity of the AD at the time, or even the Chancellor, then you at least have a similar institutional framework to PSU: everyone in authority knows, no one’s doing anything about it. We’ll see what turns up on that end.
What do Ohio State, Penn State and UNC have in common? They were all NCAA poster-children for compliance. I’m still somewhat stunned by Spanier’s excerpts from the Freeh report; he genuinely believed PSU was doing it better than everyone else. I think Gee and Smith at OSU believed it, too. And I suspect UNC’s AD-etc. also had the “It can’t happen here” mentality.
So I guess there’s your beware-the-high-horse moral of the story.
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Question: how in the world would a public university commission this sort of study and exempt it from sunshine laws? I don’t see how you could accomplish that. So if UNC proceeds with the study, it almost has to see the light of day, doesn’t it?
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Yep….what he said. Technically paid for with public funds, after all.
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As would PSU’s report. They were bright to finally stop the open wound bleeding into their hallowed halls by saying “Yep” to the Freeh Report and “Yep” to Emmert and the NCAA as soon as they hit.
Say what you want about the individuls involved in a sick culture coverup, but you have to realize that brains have now prevailed to start their healing process. It was bright for them to bow their head before the cudgel of public opinion.
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You mean cut their losses before the trail leads to PSU’s new President? ‘Cause that’s exactly what happened.
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If an internal investigation is headed up by an attorney, it could be subject to attorney-client privilege (see Upjohn v US).
While Sunshine laws generally permit most records to be open to the public, there are carve-outs for certain protected matters. I know the GA one, for instance, allows for closed door sessions when it comes to employment contract negotiations.
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I think the sticky things with public institutions is one of the attorney-client privilege exceptions, where the communication is not protected if “the communication was made in the presence of individuals who were neither attorney nor client, or disclosed to such individuals.”
At some point, where does the client, as the University, end and the State, as a non-client, begin? I’m not quite a member of the State bar, so feel free to add more color if anyone has more knowledge/experience.
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If we’re to believe McGarity is being sincere, then pick your poison – there’s plenty of problems to pick from in cfb if we’re going to solve society’s ills. There’s still oversigning by our peers, or how about the lack of minority coaches, and a strong case can be made that players should be paid, etc., etc., etc. Think for a moment about all the inequities and/or problems that have festered for years and a long laundry list can be prepared. It certainly doesn’t equate to child rape, but still, McGarity knows such things are happening. I’m in agreement with the Senator, the righteous indignation is a bit thick.
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And the “Pay the players” meme has been run up the flagpole where no one had an answer as to how to do it without increasing our problems three-fold.
Some of us feel that a scholly and care by the institution doesn’t constitute an “inequity”.
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