The more interesting story on that page is the one about legendary women's soccer coach Anson Dorrance -- in particular the comments section provide emails which seem to prove that he was lying.
It was interesting. As someone in the comments noted, the e-mail was supposedly past the scandal time, so I'm going to suggest that "on-line" and "independent study" don't necessarily mean "fraudulent" at the time the e-mail was written; they do carry a whiff of "easy" and "easy to pass".
So I don't think you can leap from that e-mail to "he knew about the fraudulent courses", but, if the e-mail is legit, you can certainly conclude that he knew about easy courses and certainly did use them to recruit players, no matter what he says.
I'm going to go out on a limb, however, and suggest that many student-athletes, at most universities, do not have a rigorous academic course-load. Actually, I knew some non-athletes in the day that didn't have a rigorous academic course-load. There's a world of difference between taking "easy" classes (even I took two, offered in the English Department).
Whether I think it is a good or bad thing that many athletes don't get academically challenged, it is almost necessary considering the difficult schedules that athletes have to maintain. But again, taking "gut" classes as much as possible is a far different thing than fraudulent ones like went on at UNC.
