UNC: ‘Student’ Athletes Cheat Themselves With Sham Classes

It’s certainly no secret that college sports are big business, especially when it comes to March Madness.

Think the NBA did very well with its postseason, by raking in $929 million in television revenue in 2013? Or that the super-popular NFL was the only sport to top a billion dollars in that category, with $1.101 billion TV dollars earned during for its playoffs that year? Well, the 2013 men’s NCAA tournament beat each of them, with a staggering $1.152 billion.

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And yet, when an investigation takes place like the one currently going on with the University of North Carolina — alleging academic fraud — we are somehow outraged, even when we know all too well that winning and money often trumps things like learning and the earning of degrees for top college athletes.

The questions pour in.

How it could happen? Didn’t men’s head basketball coach Roy Williams see any red flags or raise any questions? How could he cop out and stand on the weak defense that he’s simply the coach and it’s the job of others at UNC to catch such indiscretions?

That’s the usual narrative, right?

Perhaps to some extent, it’s a deserving one for a coach like Williams, who along with several others may have looked the other way, although Williams, his coaching staff nor UNC administrators have been directly implicated in a scheme that charged UNC with allowing its athletes to take “paper”classes, by which players like those who played under Williams were allowed to write papers that were not graded by a professor in lieu of attending lectures or meeting with professors.

Despite many of the athletes reportedly being able to read at only a second-or-third-grade level, they routinely received high marks to remain eligible on the teams for which they were playing. Those types of actions allegedly occurred over an extensive 18-year period, from 1993-2011.

"“It was just a scam, the whole thing,” Mary Willingham, a former teaching specialist in UNC’s Academic Support Program to Student Athletes, told ESPN. “It was a joke. It was so obvious.”"

While Williams and others who may have been able to do something about the situation might play dumb and could end up facing no NCAA penalties, they may not be given quite the same full pass in the court of public opinion.

"As Willingham strongly asserted, “Everybody knew… I believe that the dean of the college was complicit, I believe that the dean in advising of [the] undergraduate curriculum was complicit, I believe that the African American Studies Department was complicit and I believe that the coaches knew that it was going on.”"

Yet if you think this kind of thing started with UNC or that Williams’ basketball program is the only one to have apparently undertaken such practices to put sports, winning and money ahead of education, I have my own billion-dollar television contract for you to sign.

There has been an old adage for decades that players like those who Williams coached would take courses like “Basket weaving” to get top grades. Of course, that had absolutely nothing to do with basketball and a weave offense, and it’s common knowledge that such a practice has always been part of the game around the country for a long time now.

That doesn’t excuse any culpability on the part of coaches or school officials, but few ever talk about so-called “student” athletes’ roles in these cases — ones that are young enough to go along with being pushed through a system, yet surely old enough to know better, to decipher when they’re being taken advantage of and to stand up for their own futures when they know going in, the very slim odds of eventually becoming a professional athlete.

If they’re not sure, maybe there are some other well-known TV ads they should focus on — the ones created by the NCAA itself, featuring some of its own student athletes, that ends with the message, “There are over 400,000 NCAA student athletes, and just about all of us will be going pro in something other than sports.”

"“I feel angry at myself for allowing it, for having these blinders on,” admitted former UNC football player Deunta Williams."

Ex-star UNC basketball star Rashad McCants, who played under Williams, likewise accepts blame for his part in the academic scam, but offers a fairly feeble excuse of being young and naïve at the time.

"“I was a participant,” he confessed to ESPN’s Andy Katz. “But I was also 17 years old and I felt like… I was being ushered into a system that I felt was a part of the tradition… if you want to find the truth, the truth is there in the transcripts… as a 17-year-old at the University of North Carolina… I had no idea that this was part of an exploitation of student athletes.”"

Still, McCants couldn’t have suddenly awoken only now that UNC’s story is a high-profile one in the media. He had to know at the time that what he was doing was wrong.

"As Willingham pointed out, “Students were taking classes that didn’t really exist. They were called Independent Studies at that time, and they just had to write a paper… there was no attendance [in classes].”"

After failing classes one semester, McCants, to his own surprise, suddenly found himself considered an honor student.

"“It was a shock to me that I would actually receive the Dean’s List because… I didn’t go to class and I didn’t write papers,” he said."

Now, at age 30, McCants, long out of the NBA, and a free agent after bouncing around different leagues overseas, still puts the blame mainly on his former coach.

"He questioned, “If Roy Williams doesn’t step up and take responsibility… ‘How is it that you’re not accountable for what your players do off the floor?’”"

A former college basketball and NBA star himself, current ESPN sports analyst Jalen Rose is similarly very skeptical of Williams and his coaching staff.

"“I respect Roy Williams,” he said. “He’s a champion, he’s a Hall of Famer. But it almost is a slap in the face to the entire system, to NCAA basketball, to major collegiate sports, for him to say that he does not know what classes his kids are A) taking, B) the results of those classes and C) even talk to the students about the updates of those classes. And I know he’s not deaf, dumb or blind, but when you say that in an interview, it’s going to make a lot of people think that we are.”Rose went on to add, “Whether you’re a kid or you’re a college athlete, what ends up happening is, there are adults there to usher you along the way… so it’s almost hypocritical [for coaches] to say [they] didn’t know.”"

However, Rose by no means ignored McCants’ dropping of the ball with respect to doing what he should have while attending UNC.

"“He gets accountability also, because as a student athlete, you’re on scholarship,” Rose said of McCants. “It’s your job to go to class, it’s your job to pursue your education for your own future, it’s your job to work as hard as you can on the basketball court, to pursue your dreams, win a championship in the classroom as well as on the floor. So there is some responsibility that has to go to the individual, no doubt about it. At the end of the day, we are all accountable for ourselves.”"

Really, that’s where it should all start. Academic fraud can’t occur if college athletes don’t allow it to.

Institutions of higher learning shouldn’t ever create an environment for its student athletes to skirt the system. If they do, they deserve their fair share of blame and even NCAA sanctions.

And there is some truth to McCants’ words that at such a young age, making the instant transition from high school to becoming a college basketball star, one might easily be duped.

But that kind of justification only goes so far. As Rose implied, all students, athletes or otherwise, owe it to themselves to get everything they can out of their own individual college experiences. That includes, perhaps above all else, ensuring that they accept their own personal obligations to receive the type of education they deserve for themselves, particularly when most college athletes will never play professionally.

If they fail to see it that way, they’re not only being duplicitous with the system. They’re ultimately cheating themselves.

NCAA: ‘Student’ Athletes Cheat Themselves With Sham Classes

By Jonathan Wagner | Oct 23, 2014