If the NCAA had tried to take that argument into court, the judge would have stapled the NCAAs own bylaws to its lower lip. That's why the NCAA didn't do anything. It would have lost in spectacular fashion. The courses were in the catalog. The courses were available to all students. The courses had a syllabus. Work was assigned and work was completed. They were therefore not "fake" classes as far as the NCAA was concerned. You are asserting that the required course work was insufficient to qualify as a legitimate university course. That judgment is the specific judgment the NCAA is not allowed to make. The NCAA is a target rich environment. You can impeach its behavior any number of ways. But not with this case.
Right. Because this Board didn't immediately jump up and down over the NCAAs ruling about KO. "False in one. False in all." Unless of course you have a vested interest in ignoring that principle. I can think of some better reasons for why I might be the only one making that argument. Ten million of them, in fact.
Wasn't one of the issues involved that course work was being graded by an administrative employee named Crowder instead of professors, or even grad assistants? A similar issue has been made in other cases, most notably at TN, MN and Ohio St., I think, where athletics dept. personnel or contractors were doing the coursework for student-athletes. Either way, the grades are being determined by athletics dept. personnel or by their agents or administrators. If so, then how do you evaluate the APR? Forgetting about the relative academic merits of the courses, if Joe Athlete can skate through all the academic requirements then the whole thing is nothing but a giant scam, which it is in practice. I'd bet that not one UNC athlete ever flunked in one of those classes, but some non-athlete students probably did.
I'll admit the whole APR thing is a useless scam, but if you're going to go through the motions of treating it like it's a real thing, then the athletic dept. or non-professor departmental administrators shouldn't be grading the athletes' term papers. That goes way beyond arguing the merits of whether or not they're academically fake courses. That's complete fraud. If the NCAA has no authority to do anything about that, then they might as well close up shop and quit pretending they administer anything.
BTW, just because the NCAA may lose a court case is no reason for them to withdraw from an investigation. If that's all it takes to get them off any particular school's back, then the organization has no basis for its own existence.