re: UNC Admits Academic Fraud: Lack Of Institutional Controls, *NCAA Issues 3rd NOA

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Pretty sad testimony from Tydreke Powell, a former UNC FB player:

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....wow, "If you came he for an education, you should have gone to Harvard," - Butch Davis

"if you find out there was a basketball player in your class, and you dropped it, man, you 'ignant,' that's an "A" class."

https://www.newsobserver.com/2014/12/09/4390204_the-unc-academic-scandal-told.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&rh=1

New & Observer finally got copies of the emails, after asking for 2 years.

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This email captures the UNC scandal in a nutshell: Wayne Walden, the academic counselor to basketball players, asking Debby Crowder, a department manager, to place a learning disabled athlete in one of her “independent study type” classes, past the deadline for joining a new class and with the goal of keeping the athlete eligible to play on the court.

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Wainstein, a former chief of staff for the FBI, did not cite this Walden-Crowder email in his 131-page report, but included it in 1,100 pages of supplemental records.

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So they're still finding things that Wainstein (who was paid to do so by UNC) didn't report in his investigation. If they don't get slapped with lack of institutional controls, all bets are off. There is no such thing as a student athlete.

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It's a fairly unanimous opinion that UNC should get the death penalty for this ... everyone except UNC people of course.

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It actually made me think about what happened in a similar long term situation and how the offending team was punished. UCLA under 15 - 20 years of Papa Sam. Bruins were investigated for at least 15 years most of which were the most productive in UCLA history. In the end they only went after the last few years (starting after Wooden) and they got like 2 years probation. The NCAA did not make UCLA vacate a single NCAA title.

While few outside of Chapel Hill would say some NCAA titles should be vacated in the end I bet they get to keep all of them. If Kansas, Kentucky, or Indiana had done this all would have already felt the death penalty. UK got busted for 1,000 bucks, Kansas got busted for ticket scalping, and Indiana got their NCAA hammer from texting! Duke and UNC do far worse and not one banner has been taken down yet.

Deadspin now saying 20 DI schools are being investigated.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-cheated-by-jay-m-smith-and-mary-willingham-1425077434

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Dark Days in Chapel Hill
If you ran a college and knew there was substantial money to be had from sports but no requirement to educate athletes, you might cut corners—that’s exactly what the University of North Carolina did for nearly two decades.

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Its shameful record is the subject of “Cheated,” an engaging new book by Jay Smith and Mary Willingham.

A report commissioned by the university and issued last year found that, over nearly two decades, 3,100 Chapel Hill students, about half of them athletes, took fake classes that required no work. The average grade in the fake classes was an A. No-show grades pulled up the GPAs of sports stars who otherwise would not have met the NCAA’s modest eligibility standard of a C-minus average.

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Details of the scheme confirm the worst fears about “student athletes,” at least as regards football and men’s basketball. (Other men’s and all women’s collegiate sports generally have good academic reputations.) Some Tar Heels men’s basketball players, Ms. Willingham contends, read at a third-grade level. (A university official last year dismissed her research as “a travesty.”) As a student at Chapel Hill, Green Bay Packers star Julius Peppers failed real courses but got B’s in what were known as “paper classes,” barely supervised independent-study courses that required only a single research paper. (Mr. Peppers claims that he “earned every grade” he got at UNC.) “Cheated” reports that Rashad McCants, key to the Tar Heels’ 2005 March Madness title, “saw his GPA rise significantly—he even made the dean’s list—after a semester in which he had done no academic work.”

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“Cheated” details how Mr. Nyang’oro liked to hang around with athletes: He was even invited to serve as a “guest coach” for the football team. Tutors and academic-support staffers also enjoyed friendly access to the jocks. At football-factory and basketball-power programs, teachers and tutors who avert their eyes from grade fixing may be rewarded with courtside seats and sideline passes.

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“Cheated” recounts two instances when staffers told superiors that football or men’s basketball stars handed in plagiarized work. The university took swift, decisive action, the authors write: It punished those who made the reports.

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Some of the gain is expended on sports that lose money, but football and men’s basketball are still profit centers. At a prestige university, the African-American studies department became a mechanism to exploit African-Americans. Players may as well have been picking cotton.

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If an NCAA athlete commits a petty violation, he can be thrown out of school. University leaders know that if their schools are caught systematically cheating, a wrist slap will be their fate.

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Thousands of students got A’s in fake classes. Yet “the higher levels of the university” were guilty only of “a loose, decentralized approach to management” that prevented “meaningful oversight,” even though the existence of “easy-grading classes with little rigor” was widely known.

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The depth of UNC's cheating just keeps growing and growing....now creeping into their graduate school programs, separate of the AFAM debacle:

Former UNC official: Pressure led to improper graduate admission of athletes

I'm just gonna leave this here.....

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Pete: He had a good GPA, it's not like he was a bad student. That test was just too much.

That test was the SAT, and it proved to be a fiend. During the spring of his senior year, Waddell spent two hours a day, three days per week studying to try and make the requisite score that would make him eligible to play at Carolina as a freshman. He had the required GPA with plenty of room to spare. But the test, that standardized demon that has bedeviled many a high school student, would not be cracked.

Waddell wound up 10 points--one correct answer--short of the needed score. He had to enter UNC as a partial qualifier, which meant that he would be able to practice with the team during his freshman year, but not play in the games. It is the equivalent of a forced redshirt year. It also decreases a player's eligibility from four years to three years.

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Michael Waddell has never even been close to being in academic trouble at the University of North Carolina. He hasn't served a suspension for cutting class, or needed a dramatic late-summer turnaround to get eligible for the fall. He has, with the help of the academic staff, been a model student.

"I really had a point to prove," says Waddell, who says his toughest class was biology. "There were a lot of people out there saying, 'He's a partial, he's not going to make it.' It bothered me, but I didn't pay any attention to it."

The former partial qualifier is on track to graduate at the end of his fourth year of college, which means that under NCAA guidelines he will earn back an extra year of eligibility. That's a nice gift, but it doesn't mean as much as something else he will earn in May--a college degree.

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https://www.cbssports.com/collegebasketball/eye-on-college-basketball/25112560/north-carolina-academic-case-puts-ncaa-and-its-mission-on-trial

CBS calling out the NCAA.

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North Carolina academic case puts NCAA and its 'mission' on trial

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As another NCAA tournament starts and with the 10th anniversary of that title next month, the anticipation of North Carolina's athletic fate intensifies. A star player on that '05 team, Rashad McCants, told ESPN last year he did not attend a single class in which he received an A in that 2005 spring semester. McCants added that he was "100 percent" sure coach Roy Williams knew about the bogus classes.

In denying McCants' accusations, Williams told Sports Illustrated, "What Rashad McCants said was not true. As opposed to saying he lied, I'd like to say that what he said is not right.

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I bet Roy Williams also asked the interviewer what his definition of the word "is" was. (Bill Clinton joke, some of y'all might remember that.)

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Academic integrity goes to the heart of the NCAA mission. It is Chapter 1, verse 1 of the association's Book of Genesis.

Page 4 of the NCAA Manual reads, "... The admission, academic standing and academic progress of student-athletes shall be consistent with the policies and standards adopted by the institution for the student body in general."

To many, it's time to prove that decades-old proclamation still means something.

CBSSports.com spoke to several college administrative sources who did not want to speak on the record because of the sensitivity of the subject. On various levels, they all agreed:

The entire NCAA enterprise may be on trial with the North Carolina case.

If the school isn't hammered, then what good is the NCAA Manual? If thousands of athletes being passed through the system isn't a mockery of the mission, then what is?

Penn State was an unmitigated disaster. The Miami investigation was a mismanaged mess. The NCAA is still in court almost five years after USC was decided.

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UNC is counting-on the NCAA being a paper tiger.

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I think UNC's bet is going to be right on this, sadly. I do not understand why this isn't *the* biggest sports story going on right now. When UNC gets away with this, they will officially be bulletproof, and the NCAA will have lost all credibility in all matters, forever.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/01/sport/ncaa-response-to-lawsuit/index.html

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(CNN)After years of making the case that the education of athletes is paramount, the NCAA now says it has no legal responsibility to make sure education is actually delivered.

https://www.ncaa.org/about/what-we-do/academics, "It's our commitment -- and our responsibility -- to give young people opportunities to learn, play and succeed." And later, it says that "in the collegiate model of sports, the young men and women competing on the field or court are students first, athletes second."

But the NCAA is taking a very different position in response to a lawsuit filed by former University of North Carolina athletes. The lawsuit claimed the students didn't get an education because they were caught up in the largest known academic fraud scandal in NCAA history.

In its response, the NCAA says it has no legal responsibility "to ensure the academic integrity of the courses offered to student-athletes at its member institutions."

Even with pages of online information about academic standards, and even though the NCAA has established a system of academic eligibility and accountability that it boasts of regularly, NCAA attorneys wrote in this court filing that "the NCAA did not assume a duty to ensure the quality of the education of student-athletes," and "the NCAA does not have 'direct, day-to-day, operational control' " over member institutions like UNC.

"It's nonsense. It's double talk," said Gerald Gurney, a former athletic-academic director who is now president of The Drake Group for academic integrity in collegiate sport.

"If you look at their basic core principles, it's all about academics, the experience, the integration of academics, and the education of the student is paramount," Gurney said. "They seem to talk out of both sides of their mouths."

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Basically what I thought. The NCAA isn't going to do anything to UNC, they are going to say it's an issue for SACS Accreditation (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.) However, SACS already said that they didn't know how to handle this based on the scope of the fraud (3,100 students in fake classes for 20 years.) However, there were 31 grad students who got a Masters in Education degree from HBC Barber Scotia College and SACS removed their accreditation...so I think they know what they are supposed to do...but they think UNC is just 'Too Big To Fail.'