Andy Staples has a good read on the NCAA’s response to the North Carolina academic debacle and how that relates to the “integrity of the NCAA Collegiate Model”, whatever the hell that is.
The saddest thing here – and everything involving NCAA enforcement seems to share this – is that the hard part isn’t figuring out that something egregiously wrong happened; it’s figuring out what the NCAA will do in response.
Andy’s money (literally) shot:
It’s a safe bet that neither the men’s basketball nor football program will get the death penalty or anything of that ilk, because canceled seasons mean the ACC can’t fulfill the terms of its media rights agreement, which will bring in an average of $260 million a year to the league’s schools through the 2026-27 school year.
Too big to fail, college athletics edition.
Get The Picture 
A “Systemically Important Financial Institution” indeed…
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The Dookies are laughing and joking, the Heels are hollering…”Deal dammit, deal.”
I blame fracking and the Obama administration.
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Nah. It’s ozone depletion. Definitely the ozone.
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Where is the outrage from the national media? Harrick was run out of town for significantly less……….and UGA was widely ridiculed. (somewhat deserved) Is it because it’s “Chapel Hill”??
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It’s been out there for 4 years now. Where have you been?
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The difference, I believe, was that Harrick Jr. was just giving the basketball players grades and they didnt show up.
If they had simply taken the “3 pt” test the NCAA would have shrugged their shoulders and moved on. Giving out grades is cheating.
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There’s no evidence for a death penalty, especially in men’s BB. But it’s the headline sport at UNC, so it gets all the mentions.
I agree with Andy’s larger point: no punishment will ever be enough for certain constituencies.
You said after the Fresh Report that no university should ever go that route. Did UNC do the right thing by hiring Wainstein? Or was that a mistake?
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If it were used for the purpose of truly helping the school remedy the situation and nothing else, that would be one thing. But I think it’s dumb to trust the NCAA with something like that.
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I think it appropriate, given the Penn State experience, to point out that this really wasn’t a football or basketball problem, exclusively. This was a case of systemic academic fraud that was not restricted to athletes. As I understand it, most violators weren’t even jocks at all. Some were, some weren’t. And supposedly the coaches weren’t involved. I don’t really think this is a job for the NCAA. This is a job for the SACS. UNC’s accreditation should be at issue, not its football and basketball teams. Also, given the NCAA footdragging, if the NCAA does take action at this late date once again the people who are innocent will get punished and the real perps will get off scot-free. When the NCAA acts they usually get it wrong. The NCAA needs to come up with a better system. Either that or just disband. It’s the most useless POS organization in sports.
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I wrote the above before seeing the posts below.
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Even sadder are the excuses UNC fans are making over this. My UNC friends love to brag about how great of a school UNC is, then they conveniently turn around and say they shouldn’t be punished at all since this whole thing is an academic issue (in which normal students also took those sham classes), and not an athletic one.
Some of the most otherwise down to earth, smart, and rational people I know suddenly have put Tarheel blue blinders on over this, in which they’re now acting like Phyllis from Mulga.
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It was a complete failure on the academic side exploited by some in athletics. I think some UNC fans looked at similar cases at Auburn, UT, and Michigan, where the NCAA shrugged and walked away, and hoped for something similar. That was never going to happen here.
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If the sham classes were available to regular students, I’m afraid I have to agree with your UNC friends, I don’t see it as an NCAA issue. I don’t excuse it and if I were a UNC grad, I would be mad about it, but if it was a case where the classes were available to all students, I really don’t see it being an NCAA issue.
Incidentally, I felt the same way about the Penn State thing. I didn’t understand why the NCAA got involved. That was a criminal case and had nothing to do with the Penn State football program and NCAA rules.
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What makes it an NCAA issue is that folks in the athletic department knew it was a sham and were deliberately steering players into it.
Agree with you about PSU, by the way.
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The academic support system was on the academic side, at the insistence of academics. Every individual cited in the NOA falls under the Arts and Sciences org chart.
Boxill assumed that if the courses were sanctioned and populated with non-athletes, it was acceptable to the NCAA. That was her take-away from Auburn’s Directed Readings. She actually noted the requirements in a memo to the FAC: work.must be done (hence the 20 page paper), courses must be available to all students.
That’s the point of Andy’s article. How do you punish that? It’s the first time the failures started in academics and crept over to athletics. I think the NCAA will be harsh, and UNC made this bed through two decades of inept mismanagement on numerous fronts. But the key point here is that they thought they were following NCAA rules, not breaking them. That’s why there is such a voluminous email archive.
You said “collegiate model, whatever the hell that means.” Exactly what UNC is learning the hard way.
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I’m not questioning how it was structured. You are absolutely correct about that. But the people on the athletic side knew the set up was questionable, at least in the “if it walks like a duck” sense.
And, yeah, your last sentence is the bottom line. Given how inconsistent the NCAA has been with enforcement, why take a risk like that knowingly?
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I keep getting back to what I perceive as the fundamental issue–this is an academic fraud issue for the SCAS to deal with. Maybe if there is sufficient nexus between the basketball/football programs and the academic side of this the NCAA should get into it also but really its UNC’s accreditation that should be at issue here.
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I hear ‘ya, Mayor.
The NCAA’s problem, as Staples notes, is that academics is the peg it’s hanging its hat on to fight the antitrust cases.
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Just curious why you believe knowledge by the UNC Athletic department
makes it an NCAA issue. But knowledge by the Penn State athletic department and administration did not make it an NCAA issue in that
case?
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I think what’s interesting about all of this is that it is impossible to separate the sham classes from athletics because the students in them were disproportionately athletes. It’s also impossible to separate this kind of scandal from the current discussion around player compensation. Academic shenanigans like what went on at UNC fly right in the face of those that argue a scholarship is more than enough. If the school is willing to participate in an academic fraud to keep athletes on the field for the money train to keep rolling, then what’s really the value in that? I’m not picking on UNC specifically because I honestly think it’s just a symptom of the disease.
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It seems like a fine line to me. I don’t disagree with you, but unless the athletes were the only ones offered the sham classes, I don’t know that it’s an NCAA issue.
More and more, I’m convinced entrance requirements have to be raised for athletes if college athletics are going to be saved.
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As the Senator stated above, it became an NCAA issue because the athletics dept. at a minimum knew about the sham and took advantage of it to keep its athletes eligible. Reasonable people can disagree on whether the NCAA should be involved when academics and athletics collide (I tend to lean towards that being the school’s business), but there can’t be any doubt that these classes were being used by the athletic dept. to keep athletes eligible.
I know you and I don’t see eye to eye on this, but it’s shit like this that pushes me to believe players should just be straight up paid. If the schools aren’t going to value their scholarships by actually committing to a culture that encourages real education (trust me, UNC ain’t the only school with sham classes that athletes are encouraged to flock to for eligibility purposes), why do we expect the athletes should be the only ones to hold up their end of the academic bargain? If the schools only see you as a tool to continue the cash flow from TV and licensing and jerseys and whatnot, then it stands to reason that a free market could determine your services more valuable than the cap of the scholarship.
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You can’t open a loophole for Auburn and Clemson and UT that says its “Not a NCAA issue because non Athletes were involved.”
Hell, they’d just give nonAthletes ATM cards, get out of jail free passes, and brown bags of $; and clIm it was none of the NCAA’s business.
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I understand the point and agree that it is at best unethical. I disagree about the solution being to pay the players. I think a better solution, at least for the academic integrity issues, is to raise admission requirements for athletes to equal or close to what the regular incoming freshmen class has. The sham of it all is really the bringing in and giving scholarships to kids who would have no hope of getting into the college without drastically lowered entrance requirements simply because they can run fast, jump high and catch or throw a ball. Once the athletes actually became “students” again, the need for the sham academic classes would pretty well go away.
I understand what it would do to the level of talent and I also understand there is way too much money and too many people (coaches, ADs, NFL, etc) getting rich and benefiting from the current system for this to ever happen. But, really, if anyone wants to actually solve the problems, making “student athletes” actual college “students” would be a good first step.
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I appreciate your consistency on this topic, but I also like to live in reality when I discuss possible solutions. If you believe that the schools are all of a sudden going to just find Jesus and change their ways…well, I’ve got some beachfront property in Nebraska to sell to you.
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Beachfront property in Nebraska!! I love the mid-west. I’ll buy!! How much?! 🙂
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Is that the closing scene in San Andreas? Hard to tell from the trailers. Or was that the plot of a Superman film?
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Then the academic fraud gets passed down to the high schools. Very few investigative reporters in Ohio or South Georgia are going to open that Pandora’s Box.
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They should leave the programs in place, but take away all new scholarships for 5 years (let the current kids on scholly cycle out). UNC trying to compete with all walk ons in basketball would be more humiliating to them than the death penalty for a couple of years.
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i think that the term money shot has a literal meaning not applicable here. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/money%20shot
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It seems simple. Give them 0 scholarships for football and basketball for the next 3 years. It isn’t the death penalty but it would hurt.
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