NCAA: Committee on Infractions could not conclude UNC violated NCAA rules

[Lynyrd]

We never need that clown again. We are still paying for Dick getting involved over a decade ago.

 

[dennismenace]

North Carolina embarrassed the NCAA (and itself) in academic fraud case

 

[huskymedic]

 

[UConnSwag11]

then wtf is the apr? both have to do with academics

 

[David 76]

The APR never had any meaning. Chief has been vindicated as has Coach Calhoun.

Bout time someone gave credit to Chief.
Oh! It's Chief.

 

[David 76]

Your players have to maintain grades for the NCAA. If they are fake grades it is none of their business.
Now what is confusing about that?

 

[David 76]

Does this open precedent for others to do the same?

 

[David 76]

The verdict didn't go our way...burn cars, smash windows, fight the cops...it is, after all, the new American way.

^ former Tory

 

[ramses 2.0]

That's

Which is why the NCAA would have eventually lost in court

 

[ramses 2.0]

then wtf is the apr? both have to do with academics

A whole bunch of bS

 

[AZHuskiePop]

then wtf is the apr? both have to do with academics

Bilas was s critic of the APR metric
He saw it as meaningless and contrived solely for punitive purposes with no academic upside .
I suggest schools band together and cease reporting.

 

[CL82]

That's

Which is why the NCAA would have eventually lost in court

Not so much, actually. Organizations are allowed to have rules. One of the NCAA's rules is APR. Another is the minimum CGPA needed for a player to be eligible. UNC provided fraudulent information regarding APR. Had they provided honest information they wouldn't have been eligible for the post season and some of their players would be ineligible. The punishment for playing an ineligible player is forfeiture of the game. The NCAA could have, under their existing rules, declared every game that UNC played with ineligible players forfeit and vacated the wins. Playing ineligible for 20 years would seem to be a pretty good indicator of institutional failure to monitor. You are looking at scholarship reductions and lost of post season play potentially.

The NCAA, deliberately in my view, cast this as a "impermissible benefits issue" because then UNC's well if at at least one non-athlete got the benefit as well, it's not a sports argument is more effective. It isn't the logical or most efficient way to attack the behavior though. You have take a pretty tortured stance to suggest that that was the issue. (As an aside the a very large percentage of the money sports athletes were in these classes but only an infinitesimal portion of the general student body were in them. It would be easy for the NCAA to have concluded that they were not available to the general student body in practice. They chose not to.)

If you really want to get to the bottom of this FOIA the original penalty report that UNC shut down. I feel pretty confident that it did't exonerate the school. Otherwise, why would they suppress it until after their fundraising event?

 

[ramses 2.0]

Not so much, actually. Organizations are allowed to have rules. One of the NCAA's rules is APR. Another is the minimum CGPA needed for a player to be eligible. UNC provided fraudulent information regarding APR. Had they provided honest information they wouldn't have been eligible for the post season and some of their players would be ineligible. The punishment for playing an ineligible player is forfeiture of the game. The NCAA could have, under their existing rules, declared every game that UNC played with ineligible players forfeit and vacated the wins. Playing ineligible for 20 years would seem to be a pretty good indicator of institutional failure to monitor. You are looking at scholarship reductions and lost of post season play potentially.

The NCAA, deliberately in my view, cast this as a "impermissible benefits issue" because then UNC's well if at at least one non-athlete got the benefit as well, it's not a sports argument is more effective. It isn't the logical or most efficient way to attack the behavior though. You have take a pretty tortured stance to suggest that that was the issue. (As an aside the a very large percentage of the money sports athletes were in these classes but only an infinitesimal portion of the general student body were in them. It would be easy for the NCAA to have concluded that they were not available to the general student body in practice. They chose not to.)

If you really want to get to the bottom of this FOIA the original penalty report that UNC shut down. I feel pretty confident that it did't exonerate the school. Otherwise, why would they suppress it until after their fundraising event?

No the NCAA has to try to apply violations to bylaws adopted by the membership & that was always going to be a problem since they have historically left academic rigor up to each school. UNC felt this was a academic matter that had already been dealt with thru SACS

 

[CL82]

No the NCAA has to try to apply violations to bylaws adopted by the membership & that was always going to be a problem since they have historically left academic rigor up to each school. UNC felt this was a academic matter that had already been dealt with thru SACS

Oh! I understand now! UNC felt that the university providing false APR and player eligibility data to the NCAA was none of the NCAA's business. Help me out here, where is the NCAA's bylaw that allows schools to provide bogus academic data if it feels that NCAA isn't entitled to accurate information? I must have missed it.

 

[huskymedic]

UNC provided fraudulent information regarding APR. Had they provided honest information they wouldn't have been eligible for the post season and some of their players would be ineligible.

Oh! I understand now! UNC felt that the university providing false APR and player eligibility data to the NCAA was none of the NCAA's business. Help me out here, where is the NCAA's bylaw that allows schools to provide bogus academic data if it feels that NCAA isn't entitled to accurate information? I must have missed it.

For argument sake:

For the information to be fraudulent/bogus - wouldn’t that have had to lie about the grades all the students received? I don’t believe the classes were invalidated by anyone - leaving students credits short. So the grade was the grade. APR is only about progress towards graduation not about how “easy” the classes were. A biology class @ Memphis carries the same weight as a biology class @ Yale - no?

 

[CL82]

For argument sake:

For the information to be fraudulent/bogus - wouldn’t that have had to lie about the grades all the students received? I don’t believe the classes were invalidated by anyone - leaving students credits short. So the grade was the grade. APR is only about progress towards graduation not about how “easy” the classes were. A biology class @ Memphis carries the same weight as a biology class @ Yale - no?

That's the best way to frame it 'medic, from the UNC perspective. Yet the courses were so far out of the norm of acceptable college course work that it the school was put on probation by it academics regulating body. So the question whether the school knew or "should have known" that the courses being used were not up to standard for collegiate work. For example, giving a semesters worth of course credit for a no show class in which the "student athlete" only had to submit a paragraph? I think it fair to say that any reasonable college official would know, or "should know," that that is not college level work. Heck it's not high school level work, or middle school for that matter.

"Golly I didn't know" isn't a defense when a reasonable person, in this case a reasonable college administrator, would know. Here UNC deviated so dramatically from the standards of what is acceptable, their submission of these grades to the NCAA seems to be actively fraudulent.

 

[Chief00]

That's the best way to frame it 'medic, from the UNC perspective. Yet the courses were so far out of the norm of acceptable college course work that it the school was put on probation by it academics regulating body. So the question whether the school knew or "should have known" that the courses being used were not up to standard for collegiate work. For example, giving a semesters worth of course credit for a no show class in which the "student athlete" only had to submit a paragraph? I think it fair to say that any reasonable college official would know, or "should know," that that is not college level work. Heck it's not high school level work, or middle school for that matter.

"Golly I didn't know" isn't a defense when a reasonable person, in this case a reasonable college administrator, would know. Here UNC deviated so dramatically from the standards of what is acceptable, their submission of these grades to the NCAA seems to be actively fraudulent.

Agree, a secretary was the “professor” for this course!

 

[crewbear742]

What this means is that the NCAA's lawyers didn't think the NCAA could win in court. So the NCAA decided to back down instead of forcing a court case that would establish a legal precedent the NCAA felt would not be in its interest. It indicates just how weak the NCAA's case was. There is no conspiracy here. This was just the inevitable outcome of NCAA prosecutorial overreach.

This is an accreditation issue. It is not an NCAA issue.

 

[Leebo]

Would it be a violation for a basketball staff member to do the course work (for a real course)? Would it be a violation to fabricate a grade for work that was never done at all? If not, then the whole thing really is a sham. If it is, then how is this materially different? The staff knew what they were doing, so it was exactly the same in spirit, if superficially different in method.

 

[crewbear742]

Would it be a violation for a basketball staff member to do the course work (for a real course)? Would it be a violation to fabricate a grade for work that was never done at all? If not, then the whole thing really is a sham. If it is, then how is this materially different? The staff knew what they were doing, so it was exactly the same in spirit, if superficially different in method.

Ethically, there is no difference. That's not relevant. The NCAA doesn't enforce ethics. It enforces its rules. The NCAA didn't have a rule that covered what UNC did. That rule didn't exist because University presidents didn't want it to exist. The courses in question were technically legitimate courses under NCAA rules. There was no academic fraud under NCAA rules. That's why the NCAA blinked.

 

[uconngb]

Lol, that is delusional even for you my friend. Are you breaking the Thorazine in half again?

This is PRICELESS!!

 

[uconngb]

I told a strong stand againat the NCAA when they went against Coach, while many casual “UConn” fans pointed their figures at UConn.

Annnnnnd, Chief reaches a new low. Staggering......

 

[Jimdish255]

If the NCAA's calculations are correct this abomination will fall right off the radar this week as if it had never happened. Is there any blowback from any entity besides our fans that will amount to anything?

 

[Jimdish255]

What this means is that the NCAA's lawyers didn't think the NCAA could win in court. So the NCAA decided to back down instead of forcing a court case that would establish a legal precedent the NCAA felt would not be in its interest. It indicates just how weak the NCAA's case was. There is no conspiracy here. This was just the inevitable outcome of NCAA prosecutorial overreach.

This is an accreditation issue. It is not an NCAA issue.

Or simply that the Infractions Committee felt pressure to stand down. Why is it so hard to point out the obvious corruption of a buddy system driven by money? The classes were a fraud and athletes were funneled into them at great preference to the general student body. They were meant to circumvent the APR rules and dismiss the academic standards this particular school actually had for most of the undergrad population. This was way out of bounds and obvious to anyone but the Committee who appears to have undermined the work of it's own investigators. As stated earlier, "a travesty of a mockery of a sham." If the NCAA had no jurisdiction here then they have zero over any school's APR.

 

[CL82]

What this means is that the NCAA's lawyers didn't think the NCAA could win in court. So the NCAA decided to back down instead of forcing a court case that would establish a legal precedent the NCAA felt would not be in its interest. It indicates just how weak the NCAA's case was. There is no conspiracy here. This was just the inevitable outcome of NCAA prosecutorial overreach.

This is an accreditation issue. It is not an NCAA issue.

Again no, as I've stated above it most certainly is an organization's "business" when a member submits fraudulent information to gain an unfair advantage against other members. As I've posted above, it was well within there ability to sanction and no court is going overturn an organization's rules internal rules and regulations based upon the argument that UNC's cheating should be allowed since the fraud was done by the academic side of the university. It's a nonsense argument.

So that leaves us with the question "Why did the NCAA chose to review this matter in the only way that UNC could prevail?" I hope that press will pursue it. Minimally, FOIA'ing the original penalty notification letter from the NCAA should be insightful.

 

[Conndog]

What if parents of a student who took these courses at North Carolina sued both the school and NCAA for educational fraud of their son/daughter? They were deprived of adequate education and harmed as a result. Neither institution looked out for the best interests of their son/daughter.

 

[Mr. Hand]

What if parents of a student who took these courses at North Carolina sued both the school and NCAA for educational fraud of their son/daughter? They were deprived of adequate education and harmed as a result. Neither institution looked out for the best interests of their son/daughter.

Rashad McCants... we've come full circle.

Don't know if he actually sued or not.

 

[jibsey]

Our big APR mistake was not having total gaff courses for the entire student body that our players could stay academically eligible with. If we put them in place now we can get kids to play for us that have no business being in high school let alone college. Another benefit would be for the players to have more personal workout time on their own beyond practices, without school courses to worry about. Still no big hoop broadcaster or media names enraged about this.

 

[CL82]

Our big APR mistake was not having total gaff courses for the entire student body that our players could stay academically eligible with. If we put them in place now we can get kids to play for us that have no business being in high school let alone college. Another benefit would be for the players to have more personal workout time on their own beyond practices, without school courses to worry about. Still no big hoop broadcaster or media names enraged about this.

I actually think our big mistake was hiring Emmert. His epic mismanagement of the UConn 2000 funds and projects hurt the university financially. His subsequent butt hurt regarding the reasonable criticism he received contributed, in my belief, to the NCAA retroactively applying new APR calculation rules to old data which resulted in our sanction. Let me be clear about this. Under the old rules our transfers would not have been grounds for a post season ban. Under the new rules, using the current data at the time, we met the standards. It was only the combination of new rules and old data in which we'd be eligible for punishment. That was what the NCAA did.

 

[Travelman6]

The NCAA is not coherent, is anyone really shocked? Apply new rules, retroactively, to old data to punish one team. Totally ignore another teams erroneous APR scores based on fake classes for another bigger school.