So the other leagues want to encourage cheating amongst themselves? What UNC did was atrocious, the NCAA will do something about it, for the legitimacy of college athletics.
I don't really understand this argument. The NCAA already knew what UNC did and chose to do nothing about it. And the only change in dynamics between that earlier decision and today is that UNC is more powerful vis a vis the NCAA.
If the P5 schools remove the rules they find inconvenient, it's no longer cheating, it's just the way the business gets run. What the P5 schools want are profitable minor league football teams affiliated with their universities, providing valuable content for sale to the media, vicarious achievement for fans and an attractive atmosphere for the paying education consumer. They do have to pay a little bit of lip sevice to the fiction that the players on these teams are students held to academic standards somewhat comparable with those applied to other students at the university, but come on, let's not get fussy about some communication science homework when our boys have to get on a charter flight to go get our concussion on.
Fab Melo didn't go to Syracuse to play school, he went to play basketball. He's not an outlier. Do you think the folks who run the athletic departments at other P5 schools are looking at Syracuse and UNC and are genuinely outraged? (Hold on: I said the athletic departments). They may be angry that those lucky SOBs took a shortcut: while everyone else has to run around like chumps, finding easy classes, tutoring like crazy, holding hands and babysitting to keep their kids eligible, these guys just went into the computer and changed the grades. But I'm sure that they'd all like to dispense with the keeping up of appearances and focus on winning.
