It’s no secret the ACC has more than a few outstanding NCAA issues right now:
- There’s Miami and renegade booster Nevin Shapiro who allegedly ran wild, taking recruits to strip clubs, throwing private parties on his yacht and generally supplying impermissible benefits wherever possible.
- There’s North Carolina and its academic fraud situation that grows by the week, as the Raleigh News & Observer and Dan Kane weed through the evidence alongside an internal audit (that should soon release its findings to the public).
- And there’s Duke’s Lance Thomas and his $100,000 jewelry purchase during the team’s national championship season in 2010.
Nevin Shapiro’s Alleged Violations At Miami Are Still Unresolved (credit: David Adame / AP)
This isn’t to say all three ACC cases will be affected by the new guidelines the NCAA hopes will deter cheating by holding head coaches more accountable. Essentially the NCAA got tired of head coaches skating by on violations while letting their assistant coaches fall on the sword. Now head coaches will be presumed guilty until they provide tangible evidence that they made every attempt to run their program within NCAA rules. A skeptic would say that this just means head coaches will create a second email account, using the first to promote NCAA compliance and the second to monitor the seedy happenings in recruiting. The true cynic probably thinks this is already the case.
Back to the ACC. The only ACC case that definitely could fall under this new harsh enforcement is the Miami one, but the Hurricanes won’t face the harsher penalties unless the NCAA finishes Miami’s case by next August 1. While football coach Al Golden might find himself in warm water if the new enforcement is invoked, most of the alleged violations occurred under former coaches Randy Shannon and Larry Coker, and Frank Haith on the basketball side.
With North Carolina, it’s clear the NCAA will want to punish someone (probably the school), but it’s incredibly unlikely Roy Williams or his coaching staff will be implicated directly.
With Duke, the only way I see the new enforcement penalties affecting Mike Krzyzewski is if a member of his staff knew that Thomas received an impermissible loan and didn’t report it. In other words, almost no chance.
Long story short, it’s a long shot that these harsher penalties will directly affect ACC basketball, but they’re definitely something to keep an eye on going forward.