The NCAA spent seven years investigating North Carolina for academic fraud. It announced Friday that it couldn’t prove any NCAA violations in the course of all that investigating, so the Tar Heels are walking free. They spent millions in legal fees and went through a bowl-banned 2012 football season, but that’ll be about it. Roy Williams’ championship men’s basketball program won’t face any sanctioning.
You shouldn’t be angry about UNC walking away from NCAA justice
There’s no justice in punishing current players for things they had nothing to do with.
Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images
There is a real level on which that feels wrong. UNC has a blue-blood hoops team, and one of the things that helped keep players on that team eligible was sham coursework. The way the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions describes them:
In short, the courses involved no class attendance; limited, if any, faculty oversight; and liberal grading. The paper courses included both independent studies and courses listed as standard lectures but taught as independent studies. From 1989 to 2011, more than 6,000 students, including student-athletes, enrolled in courses that may have been administered as paper courses. 10 Although the exact number of paper courses is unknown, the Cadwalader report conservatively estimated 3,100 students took a paper course involving irregular instruction.
The reason UNC’s getting off is that athletes weren’t the only ones in those classes, and the NCAA couldn’t prove that UNC specifically tailored a system to help athletes get better grades in these joke classes. That’s the NCAA’s only real concern.
The NCAA doesn’t care about academic misconduct. The NCAA also doesn’t care about college students getting expensive gifts. It cares about athletes benefitting from those things more than the rest of their student bodies. That’s it.
If the NCAA dropped the guillotine, who would’ve been hurt?
Players, just like always. Current and future players.
Others sometimes get hurt, too, in the form of resignations and firings and damaged reputations. But the NCAA’s contempt for its own players is a central theme in everything it does, starting with not paying them and continuing through how it punishes violations of its rules. They’re the ones who bear the cost of sanctions.
When the NCAA punishes an athletic program, its primary mode of justice is to make it so that fewer athletes can go to that school for free. Really, that’s most of it.
The NCAA looks tough for cracking down on cheaters, perhaps by taking away athletic scholarship slots or limiting a team’s official visits. “Official visits” are paid for by schools, which makes them the best and often only chance for underprivileged prospects to visit a campus before deciding where they’ll live for four years. The school gets punished for cheating, and the recruits get punished for, uh, well, yeah.
Maybe the NCAA hits a school with a postseason ban, or maybe the school bans itself for a year in an attempt to earn NCAA mercy. (Ole Miss is doing that now in football.) Again, the current team’s players get punished for, uh, something. It doesn’t matter if the things the NCAA’s angry about were those players’ fault at all.
Fans of opposing teams cheer those punishments, because the dirty program next door suddenly has to work at a competitive disadvantage. Sure, the loss of a scholarship just means one fewer player, somewhere, is able to get college money. But the important thing is that the school got what it had coming to it.
UNC’s getting off light, but there’s little actual injustice here.
This scandal unfolded publicly for seven years, but the academic failures the NCAA investigated at UNC stretched for 18. Those specific issues are in the past now, and there’s not a single player on UNC’s roster who was ever enrolled in one of these hilariously light classes. They are getting away with nothing. What the people in charge of their program did or didn’t do before they got there is not their issue.
There is actual crime in college basketball. It happens all over the country all the time, and the FBI’s investigating some of that world right now. When real crimes happen, and when there are actual, human victims, people need to get punished. Sometimes good people get hurt in that process, which is terrible.
UNC’s bogus coursework did not have any victims, aside from the players who were forced to spend time doing it so they could stay eligible to play a sport they didn’t get paid to play. A couple of ACC basketball coaches might feel like they got cheated, too. I will pray for them, but they’re not worth punishing this generation of UNC players.
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