UNC gets away with it — all of it
The bumper sticker became popular among University of North Carolina fans at the dawn of the 1970s, not 10 years after the men’s UNC’s basketball program was accused of point shaving and major NCAA violations under former coach Frank McGuire and at least two decades before it apparently began encouraging its GPA-challenged student-athletes to load up on the school’s African and Afro-American Studies curriculum in order to remain eligible.
Mildly irritating but undeniably witty, that bumper sticker asked: “If God’s not a Tar Heel, why’s the sky Carolina Blue?”
That question took on a far darker, more troubling meaning Friday morning, when the NCAA appeared to reluctantly announce that seven years worth of snooping into just how much UNC athletes benefited from those bogus courses would result in zero penalties. That came after numerous academic experts expected UNC to possibly lose its 2005 NCAA basketball title because 10 Tar Heels on that team carried that major.
Instead — despite Infractions Committee chair and Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey labeling UNC’s actions “troubling” — Baby Blue Nation got to hang its just-won 2017 banner right beside its 2005 and 2009 championship flags Friday night with no worries about those earlier titles coming down.
However, there is a silver lining for the rest of college athletics, especially those that someday may find themselves in the NCAA’s crosshairs.
That something is this: If college athletics’ governing body can let the Tar Heels walk on charges that University of Maryland president Wallace Loh labeled “abysmal” this past spring, adding, “I would think this would lead to the death penalty by the NCAA,” then everyone’s innocent of everything.
For instance, the Louisville men’s basketball program should start paying every student some hidden cash to come there instead of only that $100,000 the FBI said it supposedly slipped Brian Bowen. The NCAA said there were no violations regarding
UNC because regular students and student-athletes alike benefited from these phony classes, so paying athletes and non-athletes alike should be similarly OK.
And Memphis basketball. That Final Four appearance you were stripped of in 2008 because point guard Derrick Rose was charged with standardized test fraud despite twice being cleared by the NCAA? You need to appeal. If the NCAA can’t void at least one of the two NCAA crowns UNC won while keeping a notable portion of its talented players eligible with sham classes over a span of 18 years, how can it possibly erase your almost-dream season over a single questionable test score?
And if they won’t reverse that ruling, take them to court.
Let’s see how that lawsuit would fare before a jury of Memphians.
Regardless, what happened Friday morning was worse than abysmal and far worse than troubling.
Or as Gerald Gurney of the academic watchdog Drake Group told CBS in 2014: “I can assure you the depth and breadth and sheer numbers of (UNC) affected athletes is in fact the largest and the most egregious case of academic fraud by far in NCAA history. I feel almost certain that this is an egregious lack of institutional control. If ever there was a case, this is it.”
Before it gave the Tar Heels a get-out-of-jailfree card Friday morning, the NCAA had charged UNC with a lack of institutional control.
But then it backtracked, apparently deciding to embrace a different narrative. Something along the lines of: If every student is cheating, no one is.
That may have delivered a Carolina blue sky to Tar Heels backers the nation over, but it should leave everyone else concerned about the moral and ethical future of big-time college athletics feeling a far darker shade of blue today.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com