The paper being written for a student surely happens, but is not a systemic program, nor likely something that any assistant coach performs. Schools are actually pretty careful about that stuff and professors are generally not dumb either.
I was at a wedding last weekend and a relative and his girl friend are both tutors at Syracuse for the football team - they are not even allowed to put a mark on a student's draft and the athlete's academic area where they meet is now set up with bolted down monitors all facing a wall of oneway mirror glass with a monitoring space on the far side. (They said their students were really nice, if less than intellectual giants, and really were trying hard. Sort of a nice review. And having both taught HS kids who they could intimidate, the guy said he now had to figure out a way to get the same effect - he now threatens to start crying if the 6'6 300 pounder doesn't get the work done!)
I am not nieve in thinking that academic fraud is not occurring at every university and that it occurs more often relative to scholarship athletes, but ... the cases that have come to light, and they do come to light with some regularity (often without major publicity) are nothing compared to the numbers and length of time involved at UNC. Most involve a few athletes and one or two misguided tutors/assistant coaches. Others involve a single instance of a test getting out before it was administered and the circulation of a cheat sheet. The other area is plagiarism which involves (mostly) a single person and those are almost never publicized, but are real. (One of things that really shocked me in the email in the UNC case is the administrator and the ethics head discussing the likely plagiarism (self-plagiarism is the same 'crime' as appropriating others work) so blandly.)[/QUOTE
UcM: not exactly certain what you are saying in the first sentence of your final paragraph re "every university," so I'm not sure if we're on the same page of not on this particular issue. I think we are in agreement if I read you correctly. Either way, I do want to say that, at least in my day, I never saw or heard of any instance of athletes getting any academic slack at the university I attended, and I was in a position to know. I'd be very surprised if it was any different there today.