North Carolina getting special treatment from NCAA, public, amidst academic fraud scandal
The 2015–2016 NCAA Basketball season has tipped off, and the No. 1 University of North Carolina Tar Heels have yet to receive any penalties from the NCAA for an academic scandal at the university revealed more than a year ago.
A report from October 2014 concluded that UNC’s athletic department had engaged in over 18 years of academic fraud with student-athletes, enrolling thousands of players into paper classes to keep them eligible.
13 months and one full basketball season later, the men’s basketball team and the rest of UNC’s athletic department not received a formal decision from NCAA. The apparent lack of action among the NCAA can in part be attributed to UNC admitting to additional athletic-academic violations in August 2015, which further delayed the investigation process and all but guarantees no decision will be made until after the season is over.
While last season was full of tension and uncertainty for the Tar Heels men’s basketball team, a squad that remained in the top 25 all season long, it appears an entire year having passed without an NCAA punishment is creating a new vibe for this season — as if the scandal never happened.
UNC head coach Roy Williams said at ACC Media Day he feels “the scandal cloud is beginning to lift” on the No. 1 team in the country due to the delay of action by the NCAA. Williams said the team “has felt confident in that they do things the right way.”
Though Williams and the men’s basketball program in particular were not found guilty by the NCAA, it doesn’t change the fact that 167 men’s basketball players were participants in the fraudulent classes since Williams came to UNC in 2003. If the athletic department as a whole is hit with sanctions, the men’s basketball program will not necessarily be immune from effects of those penalties.
The Tar Heels have been an odd exception from the norm when it comes to recent collegiate athletic-academic scandals, especially for men’s hoops.
When SMU Men’s Basketball was found guilty of academic assistance violations earlier in the year, the NCAA didn’t take long to act on the situation, banning the Mustangs in September from postseason play this season and suspending head coach Larry Brown nine games.
Immediate action was also taken by the NCAA against Syracuse in March this year, when it was confirmed that the university’s basketball program had been involved in academic fraud for nearly a decade . Similarly to SMU, Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim was suspended for the nine of the team’s conference games this season, and the program was forced to vacate 108 wins under Boeheim as part of the penalties.
Prestige may have a factor in the NCAA’s lack of urgency with any severe sanctions against UNC. In an October 2015 article, Dallas Morning News Columnist Kevin Sherrington argued it’s easier for the NCAA to “drop the hammer” on SMU than UNC because SMU “is a small school that doesn’t have the basketball reputation that UNC does.”
On a similar note, SB Nation writer Mike Rutherford predicted in a June 2015 article that the UNC academic fraud case “will come to a quiet end,” simply because the public wants it to. Rutherford also argued UNC was in a favorable position because the scandal did not center around one actor.
The idea of the NCAA showing favoritism to UNC’s basketball program even surfaced in non-sports publications. Bloomberg-Business writer Paul Barrett claimed in a June 2015 article that that fact that “the charges sound so severe but give a pass to those in charge of men’s basketball” is proof that the NCAA does not want to penalize the team.
The NCAA can make a decision whenever its members feel they have enough evidence to do so, but if they wait much longer, UNC may emerge unscathed from one of the biggest academic scandals in college-sports history.
