Will Anything Actually Happen?

The first UNC course offered as a favor to the basketball team, scheduled in 1988, was an independent study for two painfully weak students who hovered at or below the eligibility line. They received helpful B's, and out of that little experiment the UNC course scam was born. In fall 1992 one star of the basketball team ostensibly pursued an independent study with a faculty member who was on sabbatical at the time. (I know this because I shared a fellowship leave with that faculty member.) This had to have been one of the "shadow" courses offered by the administrative assistant who played such a central role in the fraud, a generous woman whose closest friend was the basketball team's academic counselor. She assigned A or B grades in the shadow courses, which required no attendance and little work. One player on the 1993 team took seven suspect courses with her help; four starters on that team majored in the department where she worked. UNC's 1993 championship run seems to have been aided and abetted by fraud.

By 2005, when UNC won its next national championship, the "paper class" system (so called because students had to turn in only one paper of uncertain provenance to collect their A's) was hitting on all cylinders. Players on the men's basketball team took over one hundred of the fake courses, with one racking up eighteen. Star forward Rashad McCants has admitted that he rarely attended a single class in the spring of 2005 -- even though he landed on the Dean's list for the high grades he was awarded. Players on the 2009 national championship team received similar favors.

NotOstertag wrote: Joe Dooley's Florida Gulf Coast team makes UNC the 1st number 1 seed in history to lose to a 16. Then, reeling from that embarrassment, the NCAA lowers the boom, and 10 seasons worth of W's disappear from the all time win list.

Senex68 wrote: The one major difference between the current environment and, say, 10 years ago, is the internet. If the NCAA does nothing, the uproar will be a major issue for them, and will continue for a long time. And there may even be litigation, both adverse to the NCAA and UNC. Cheating damages people and institutions, and this level of cheating changed the landscape of college basketball for a generation. In many ways it was the worst violation of NCAA regulations in history due to the number of athletes involved, the number of university employees involved, and the number of games (championships!) involved. The implications for UNC are profound, and if the NCAA does actually act with seriousness, UNC will be damaged irreparably. I don't think it will happen, but just imagine the impact of voiding multiple NCAA titles in basketball. It would finally put The Kentucky cephalopod in a much lower position in the hierarchy of dishonesty, behind such alleged paragons of virtue, Dean Smith and Roy Williams. I don't know what will happen, but it just seems impossible to me that nothing will happen, and this kind of scandal can't be minimized if they address it at all. It's pretty much an 'all or nothing' kind of situation.