- Raleigh News & Observer: At a widely-viewed press conference yesterday in Chapel Hill, independent investigator Kenneth Wainstein publicly revealed his findings concerning the academic fraud that we now know began as far back as 1993 at North Carolina. His detailed 131-page report confirms much of what the Raleigh newspaper has already been uncovering since 2011. In this piece, Luke DeCock captures the significance of yesterday’s revelations in Chapel Hill, including the fact that the school’s administration finally admitted what was suspected all along – UNC academic advisors steered athletes to phony classes in order to keep them eligible to compete in football and basketball.
- CBSSports: Officially, head coach Roy Williams was not implicated in any of the wrongdoing. But according to CBSSports.com‘s Gary Parrish, that doesn’t mean Williams is innocent in the matter. Basically, Parrish makes a reasonable case that if Williams wanted to know the truth about the phony coursework, he easily could have. After all, the basketball program’s academic advisor at the time, Wayne Walden, was brought to Chapel Hill by Williams when he left Kansas in 2003. It seems reasonable to assume that the two had a close relationship, and that they would be comfortable talking with each other about the administrative intersections of athletics and academics. In Wainstein’s report, Walden admits that he knew that the classes in question were fake and that he sometimes steered players to them. So if Williams didn’t know what was going on, why did his basketball players stop taking those classes over the next several years?
- CNN: One of the new revelations that came out in the report is that the fraudulent classes started all the way back in 1993. Of course the head coach at UNC at that time was Dean Smith. In this article, CNN investigative reporters Sara Ganim and Devon Sayers point out that 54 basketball players enrolled in those phony classes during Smith’s tenure, which ended after the 1997 Final Four. This now necessarily raises questions about those last four years of the legendary Smith’s career, someone who has always maintained a spotless reputation in terms of the academic integrity of his program. Many observers have noted that Smith’s philosophy behind recruiting also seemed to change around that time, perhaps in response to the rise of archrival Duke’s back-to-back National Champions in the early 90s. Smith brought in the talented but brash 1993 class of Jerry Stackhouse, Rasheed Wallace and Jeff McInnis, which is not to say that these were bad kids, but they certainly didn’t act like what we traditionally thought of as quiet, humble and gentlemanly Dean Smith/”Carolina Way” players. There’s also the fact that upon his retirement four years later, Smith said that he did not enjoy coaching anymore. Remember that this was coming from one of the great competitors of all-time in the sport, someone who was about to begin the 1997-98 season with a completely loaded team. Is it too much of a reach to tie those two things — his suspected change in recruiting philosophy and abrupt retirement several years later — to what we now know about the academic fraud going on at North Carolina? Perhaps the bigger question is whether any reporter will be bold enough to take on that legacy and try to get to the truth, while fighting the “how dare they” backlash that would certainly ensue given Smith’s current poor health.
- Raleigh News & Observer: Another surprise from the report was that the academic fraud extended to other teams in the UNC athletic department. Most of us have focused on the football players and men’s basketball program, but they weren’t the only Tar Heel athletes taking advantage of the fake classes. In another reaction article from the N&O, Jane Stancill describes how a current faculty member has admitted steering members of the women’s basketball team to the phony classes as well. It appears that there was a network within the academic advising community at UNC that spread the word about a way to help keep their athletes eligible and in the lineup.
- WRALSportsFan: Former UNC academic adviser Mary Willingham was interviewed for her reaction on the report’s findings, which mostly vindicate much of what she originally asserted. Known now as “Whistleblower” Willingham, she makes the larger point that the real problem is that colleges are failing to educate their athletes. While that may be true, I think it’s time to face the root cause of what is going on across the country at the big-time programs. The model we want to put forward as fans of college sports is so outdated that it’s ridiculous. We want to see the best athletes play on the field or on the court for our favorite schools, but we don’t want to know how they are able to get admitted to the school or what classes they take or what grades they get, so long as they perform. We only want to know those facts about the OTHER school. Then there’s the colleges themselves, which cling to the notion that their athletes should be able to perform in the classroom just like the rest of the student body. Being an elite athlete today is a full-time job when you add up all the time requirements, and do we really expect them — many of whom the school made an exception to admit in the first place — to carry full course loads and stay on course to graduate? It’s time for a new model that fits modern realities. We are not going to give up high-level college sports so let’s rid ourselves of the farce that is the “student-athlete.” They’re already treated differently so why not change the class requirements to give credit hours (six?) each semester for full-time participation in a sport? Maybe if they only had to take two classes per semester, we could actually expect them to take some meaningful classes and perform their own work. The alternative is to cut time spent on their sport and that would mean fewer practices, less travel, no late night games for TV, and so on, but we know that’s not going to happen. But something needs to give in order to reduce the overwhelming incentives to cut ethical corners. If it happened at North Carolina, it doesn’t mean it is happening at all the other schools, but it does mean that it can.