North Carolina Tarheel academic fraud

[superjohn]

Just watched Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel and they did a segment on the joke that is academics at many Universities and as we all know North Carolina was worse than anyone. A professor details how many of the athletes she worked with read at a fourth grade level with some even lower. They were told they had to major in African American Studies, many athletes including seven players on the UNC 2005 championship basketball team all went to no show classes, they never once stepped foot in a classroom and just turned in a paper at the end of the semester which they copy and pasted. This woman had to teach players phonics, they didn't even know the sounds that letters make. I already knew about all of this but it will probably be an eye opener for many and with all of this information the NCAA investigated and said there wasn't a systemic problem at UNC and no penalties were handed down to the basketball team. It's clear that the NCAA protects certain schools and penalizes others. North Carolina failed these student athletes and so did the NCAA.

 

[Fishy]

But, hey, their APR was just ducky and the NCAA doesn't see anything there to investigate.

It's all good.

UConn really just should have invented their APR numbers. Then we should have faked graduation rates for the entire campus so we could tell the NCAA, "hey, this isn't just an athletic thing, you know!"

Because that makes it okay.

 

[superjohn]

We didn't play ball with the NCAA. The message from the NCAA seems to be if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying. One of the players asked the teacher if she could teach him to read so he could read the things posted on his Facebook page. The good news for any of these UNC kids who can't even read the English language is they may have learned a couple of words in Swahili class, oh yeah that's right they didn't have to show up to Swahili class.

 

[seanmc94]

I don't know whether to be outraged at the NCAA and the school, or heartbroken for these kids. Can you imagine not being able to read?

 

[7774]

Can you imagine not being able to read?

I do every time I see you've made a new post.

But yeah, it's scary to think what type of life that would be for someone.

 

[FfldCntyFan]

What killed us was the convergence of a few things:

Unlike most other schools we did not try to job the system.

Emmert despises us very likely for something that happened while he was in our employ.

We were viewed as 'new to the club' in terms of power programs yet visible enough that the general public knew we were (are) a power program.

Emmert saw hammering us on this stupid metric as a way to tell the general public "yes, the NCAA is serious about schools that don't care about their athletes' academic records" by hanging us out to dry and not worry about offending any program that the NCAA will never touch (cough cough UNC, cough cough Duke).

As deplorable as what happened at Penn St was, the punishment (specifically having some authority to punish the football program) that the NCAA gave them was miles beyond their scope of authority. The NCAA succeeded in this because any open objection would be viewed by the public as the equivalent of defending Hitler. Emmert somehow had jurisdiction to do what he did to PSU yet had no jurisdiction to impose any penalties on UNC? Really? How the F#&K is that possible?

 

[Tbone4457]

The NCAA is simply corrupt. It's obvious when there are no penalties for UNC's academics, no punishment when ESPN reports Carlos Boozer got A's in summer school at Duke while he was playing overseas, no penalties for numerous reports of a videotape interview of a high school kid talking about Coach K personally offering him a scholarship during a period when schools were not allowed to talk to the kids, etc, etc. Hopefully, the major conferences will go forward with plans to leave the NCAA

But, there is no excuse for UCONN's past poor academics or low graduation rates. Even though it hurt, it was good for the players that the information came out and there is more of a real focus on academics for the players as most of them will have to earn a living outside the NBA in the future.

A great idea I heard that isn't getting any traction is the idea of making some sports a major where the players will also learn about coaching, scouting, becoming an agent, team ownership, and all the other jobs around the sport so they have options to work in the industry after graduation. Then they could have paid summer internships with pro teams here and abroad and live under the same sensible rules as all the other college majors. Wow, that sounds a lot like freedom for the players.

 

[Dove]

I don't know whether to be outraged at the NCAA and the school, or heartbroken for these kids. Can you imagine not being able to read?

Do not be heartbroken for the kids at all. They could have gone elsewhere when they heard about no-show classes. They bought into the scam.

 

[Dave Carlson]

Do not be heartbroken for the kids at all. They could have gone elsewhere when they heard about no-show classes. They bought into the scam.

You act as if their alternative to no-show classes at UNC was hitting the library harder or extra study sessions or going to another school where they would have been held to the same standards as other, not-fake-UNC-class-taking college students. These kids couldn't read.

 

[tzznandrew]

Do not be heartbroken for the kids at all. They could have gone elsewhere when they heard about no-show classes. They bought into the scam.

Many of them have been used since the time they were in middle school. Handlers pretending to care for them. Hell, their high schools had to have rigged things so that they would graduate.

It's a difficult system. They aren't wholly innocent, sure, but they are pawns in a system that makes a ton of money off of them and that only a small percentage of players will ever truly benefit from.

 

[UConn5]

Bilas addressed how ridiculous it is that UNC wasn't going to be punished by the NCAA but UConn had to miss a tournament. Plainly and simply incentivizes a school to lie about grades. If you make up them up, you're ok, if you're honest you get screwed.