In an interview with Outside the Lines, Rashad McCants, the second-leading scorer on the North Carolina basketball team that won the 2004-2005 national title, admitted that tutors wrote his term papers, he rarely went to classes, and he remained able to play because he took bogus classes designed to keep athletes academically eligible. I know that winning is important to all athletic programs, but Id rather have an empty trophy case than having student athletes taking bogus classes to remain academically eligible. IMO.
http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/11036924/former-north-carolina-ba...
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But remember... The NCAA closed the investigation on this case after that very thorough digging and found that UNC did nothing wrong.
The NCAA is a SCAM its becoming more evident every day.
I think that the worst part is the disservice they did to their student athletes. Very few make it to the pro's but a solid educational foundation would help them all through their lives. I'm proud of the way VT handles their program.
wait... UNC has academics?
yes but its akademiks
Unless you're a revenue-sport athlete, that is...
You know, I am just adamant about not paying student athletes.
But the primary rationale for that is that they are receiving a high-dollar value education for free if they are on scholarship.
That rationale pretty much vanishes when the universities are not just failing to teach these students, but are actively participating in fraud that is aimed at creating revenue for the institution. And the NCAA, active participant in this fraud or not, is profiting from it as well.
If the system cannot be changed -- if the NCAA cannot or will not crack down on the UNC's that are habitual offenders, then I may just have to change my opinion on paying student athletes.
My advice to players who received a bullsh*t education from a university would be to get together, collect their evidence, get lawyers, and start a class action lawsuit against those Universities and the NCAA.
Any lawyers on this board that could comment on whether there is an actual case here?
there is a case but the problem is when you sign that little letter/scholarship offer you basically revoke your right to sue or start a case... as with everything there is fine print. That's why you see players that have graduated/already finished their eligibility team up with lawyers and see what they can do.
But it also goes both ways.. the athlete should want to learn and if he was told to take these bogus classes then he should take a stand and say no, I want to learn so that when I graduate I can have an actual job.
Think of all the athlete's that are now graduating from UNC.. think a HR person is going to look at them and say yeah you know what you're doing. I trust that your education covered a lot of skills and wasn't just a bogus class. They're screwing over the whole athletic department/students in a way
I get that there is a contract, but fraud by one of the parties generally voids contracts.
but this so called fraud would be extremely hard to prove. see my points above regarding the athlete side of school.
Well I think one major factor would be that both parties are committing the fraud. From the excerpt above it sounds like the guy was actively and knowingly not going to class and taking the bullshit courses to play football. That would probably limit their recourse.
What gets me the most about the UNC thing is how much their alumni and fans don't care that this happened completely not realizing just how much this is devaluing their own degree from the school.
UNC now has the reputation of giving credits toward a degree for classes that don't exist. If I'm hiring someone and I see UNC as their place of learning, from now on I HAVE to think twice about it, because you don't know whether or not this person benefited from grades they didn't earn, either by having them changed after the fact, or completely fabricated.
such words. same thought. best friends !
yep
I don't think this will devalue a non-athlete's degree from UNC. C'mon...underwater basket weaving has been around forever, at every institution.
We all know the deal. Also, as far as the school committing fraud against the student; it's just ridiculous to think that the athletes are not complicit in said fraud.
Hey, you show me someone with those skills and I'll show them an offer letter. Those candidates are hard to find.
It's a shame because UNC has lots of good students and athletes. The terrible decision of a few is tarnishing the entire university. I hope they learn from such a debacle.
Just checked facebook, and my god... UNC fans have absolutely flooded the thing with outright anger directed at McCants for being disloyal to the university and only wanting to garner up publicity for a book or whatnot.
It has been very curious to see the fans of that school throughout this process. As soon as someone comes out and starts talking about what is literally going on at UNC, they are publicly dragged through the mud, and lynched among the fans. The academic adviser was eventually forced out of her job by this whole thing (with a Rams Club board member taking to twitter to publicly celebrate her dismissal) and now this.
I have said this before and I will say it again. If EVER there was a university as a whole that deserved the NCAA's death penalty, its North Carolina. They deserved it for football, and if what McCants is saying about basketball is true, they deserve it in men's basketball as well. They deserve every accomplishment those two sports have earned throughout their history stripped away and the reset button needs to be pressed for the whole thing. Their entire athletic dept is out of control, and they deserve the harshest of penalties possible.
Now that his NBA career is over, maybe McCants is not satisfied with the education that he received from the university. Unfortunately it might be too late to impose any kind of penalty against the basketball program.
Amen,brother ! 07. Smugness at unc is only surpassed by smugness at Loluva .
my family is in the minority of unc fans. my grandpa and i are the only two in our family to go to tech. my mom dad wife other grandparents and several cousins went to unc. my wife and parents have pulled their membership from the rams club and want nothing to do with the school until this corruption within unc is fixed. my dad even said that the unc problems are much worse than paying players because it devalues the academic institution which is the basis for college athletics.
one thing that i have learned living in nc is that unc fans are about as bad as uva fans when it comes to their smugness. a majority of the unc fans ive talked to said "well it is just the football team and i bet roy (williams) would never let anything like that happen in the basketball program. so if it's the football program to get punished it's not a big deal." and like others have said, a majority of the unc fans get mad at the whistleblowers for bringing these issues to light.
this is a core problem with carolina athletics and the school and its disgusting. i would feel sick if this happened at tech because i worked my ass off for my degrees and for them to be devalued because of fake classes the athletes took would be bullshit. i really wish the ncaa would punish them harshly but i doubt anything significant will happen.
This is terrible!
BUUUUUUUUT..they did win a title
I'd rather see my Hokies win a title the right way than cheating their way to a championship.
The fallout from a scandal just isn't worth the potential championship. Do I believe VT Athletics bends the rules from time-to-time? Sure, but that goes for every NCAA program. What UNC, Miami, and other programs did was blatant.
So here's what we do.....
I say VT offers an academic scholarship to McCants and admission to the degree program of his choice.
This can be renewed every semester IF he passes his courses.
And we call it 'UNC degree ain't worth shit' scholarship.
This could blow things open:
Emphasis mine.
Once little fish start trading jail-time for giving up information, it's usually a bad sign for the bigger fish.
And more dirt is unearthed in Chapel Hill... "Improper" admission of athletes to grad school:
http://www.newsobserver.com/2015/02/28/4589708_former-unc-official-press...
In which the NCAA is revealed to be completely unwilling to be a fair arbiter of the rules.
ex UNC Grad Admissions director sends evidence of malfeasance to the NCAA.
NCAA doesn't respond to her, rather forwards that information to UNC lawyers.
Could the NCAA be any more transparent that they are not interested in pursuing actions against teams that make them money?
Athletes are given so much wiggle room when it comes to athletics, and UNC has taken up every little bit of that space and some more. The claims of some UNC fans that all schools do this rings hollow and it untrue. While it's uncertain that this is an NCAA violation, it is certainly inappropriate.
I used to be in the camp that the NCAA is weak, hamstrung by the inability to get substantiating records. We as fans get to see sensational statements in the media, and it passes the sniff test, but isn't actionable in and of itself. Without subpoena authority, all the NCAA can do is take people's voluntary testimony and make records requests that the schools can blow off. I'm no lawyer, but I could even see limitations when someone forwards emails ("fruit of the poisonous tree" is the phrase that I recall from Law & Order - totally an authoritative primary source).
The knee-jerk ban/un-ban on Penn State made me reconsider. Passing allegations to Evrard is at best "you have a problem, look into it and tell us what's up" (stupidly passing the buck as "delegation").
Now I think the NCAA is just another case of an institution that can't detangle itself from the interests of its constituents. Sure, it's supposed to be impartial, but it's an organization of people who have their own pre-existing loyalties. There are surely some good people with integrity and noble intentions, but the system as a whole just won't work that way. I've come around to seeing the NCAA as a parallel to the UN, the nomenklatura, GIRoA, certain government agencies (pick an example that suits your politics), or the Galactic Library Institute (damn Pila). (Nerd alert, I know. Whatever, I'm reading Uplift at the moment, so it's fresh in mind. I'm a Tech engineer, I'm comfortable with myself.)
The NCAA has been very publicly hand delivered about as much incriminating evidence as possible against UNC over the past 5 years, for events ranging from paying athletes and hiring agents to steer them towards UNC with gifts, to having players publicly showing off all the benefits they have received at UNC, to players publicly coming out and admitting how much of a joke their academic system is for athletes, to getting caught red handed in outright academic fraud by falsifying grades and classes to keep athletes eligible. And these events transcend all sports.
The NCAA has yet to act.
What more do they need? At this point, its glaringly obvious that someone high ranking at the NCAA has a vested interest in keeping UNC's nose clean. Oh, right... the lead investigator assigned to the UNC case is a UNC alum....
Exactly the NCAA a prime example of regulatory capture. Punish the kid who violates some arcane rule (or needs place to sleep) and let the bigger problems fade into the regulatory ether
Awww man Beyer is going to Med School at UNC. I hope those bastards don't stain the fine education he recieved at Tech.
Wow that's great, congrats to him.
Anyone know if Will Johnston is still trying to go to med school?
Today, the NCAA announced it will not prosecute the University of North Carolina for a litany of issues related to academic fraud.
A NCAA spokesperson said "there is so much...really just soooo much...we simply don't know where to begin. Because we don't know where to start, we'll never be able to finish."
It is believed to be the first time the NCAA has invoked it's "Overwhelmed and Unable to Initiate" clause.
Amazing that the UNC football team cheated like mofos and still won nothing of value.
Like a frustrated Tar Heels fan said on another message board "we even suck at cheating"...yup
I really hope I get the chance to be in a position where I'm recruiting for a company, just so I can laugh at anyone who comes to me with UNC on their resume. Is it a bit unfair? Maybe. But hey, if your institution doesn't give a crap about the integrity of their academics, why should I? I'd see that as a small portion of justice for something that has quite literally overloaded the NCAA to the point of a complete shutdown.