On Saturday, Dan Kane of the Raleigh News & Observer posted a follow-up piece on the North Carolina academic/athletic scandal in the wake of last month’s Wainstein Report, a searing description of the details of a “shadow curriculum” that allowed many North Carolina student-athletes over an 18-year period to take fraudulent “paper classes” in order to remain eligible. Kane has been lauded for his investigative reporting since the onset of the scandal several years ago, and his work has been largely vindicated by Wainstein’s findings. In his latest article, Kane reveals that, after reviewing the corresponding documents underlying the report, North Carolina’s 2005 National Championship team made a mockery of the term “student-athlete.”

Were these 2005 NCAA Champs “Student-Athletes” or merely Athletes?
(Getty Images)

Kane reports that several key members of that team were free to concentrate on basketball without worrying too much about college classwork, as a total of 35 bogus classes were taken by UNC basketball players during the 2004-05 academic year (that comes out to 2.7 fraudulent classes per scholarship player). Drilling down even further, 26 of those courses were held during the crucial spring semester that included March Madness. It’s reasonable to presume that some players on that team did absolutely no academic work from January-May 2005, which, as Kane suggests, could have given the Tar Heels a competitive advantage over schools with players who were required to attend classes and perform the work that was assigned in them.

As the NCAA continues to sniff around the North Carolina campus, the question becomes what should happen to the 2005 National Championship banner that prominently hangs in the Smith Center? The NCAA will eventually hand out some sort of punishment to the program — presumably — but does the fake-class scheme rise to the level of the organization forcing the school to vacate its appearance in the 2005 NCAA Tournament? No champion has ever lost its title, but let’s look at that possibility. Since the inception of the NCAA Tournament in 1939, the NCAA has vacated 11 Final Four appearances. They are as follows:

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We realize that Jim Calhoun hasn’t decided to retire yet and there is still a pretty good chance that he will come back for at least one more season given his frequently stated desire to always look for a fight. Still we think that it is reasonable to suggest that even if he doesn’t retire during this off-season he will be retiring in the near future given his age (he will turn 69 in May) and well-documented medical history. So we ask the question that has been on the minds of many journalists during the past few days: where does he rank historically?

Calhoun already has quite a legacy

By almost any measure (ignoring the opinions of some rival fans) Calhoun would be considered a top 10 coach all-time putting him into a category that includes such luminaries as John Wooden, Mike Krzyzewski, Dean Smith, Adolph Rupp, Bob Knight, Phog Allen, and others. That much is obvious, but once you get into that group the measures used to differentiate those coaches gets more subtle. Certainly a coach would need to have longevity and a consistent record of putting winning teams on the floor, which could be measured by the career wins. A good bar to set there would probably be 600 wins. If you want to argue for a higher standard be careful because the legendary John Wooden “only” had 664 career wins, a number that many current number-crunching analysts would deem paltry compared to others in this group. Winning championships is certainly important, but as this season clearly demonstrated it doesn’t necessarily reflect having the best team, which Northern Arizona coach Mike Adrus indicated with his vote in the final coaches’ poll. Still at some point that is what the sport boils down to. When we look back at this season we will remember UConn’s tournament run more than Pittsburgh‘s excellent regular season. Setting the bar at 2 NCAA titles narrows the group down to 13, but includes individuals like Billy Donovan, who picked up his championships in back-to-back years, and would have a hard time making a list of top 10 active coaches much less top 10 all-time. It also leaves much to be desired when you consider that highly successful coaches like Jim Boeheim and John Thompson only have one championship each despite having a much bigger historical impact on college basketball than Donovan (at least to this point). The next factor would probably be a coach’s impact on the program and the game, which is a more nebulous concept and consequently impossible  to quantify. Still all other things being equal you would probably have to give the nod to someone who turned a program from an also-ran into a national power over someone who took over at a traditional power and continued to win even if that coach did bring the program up a notch or two. Others have undertaken the endeavor of trying  to rank coaches in order with The Sporting News being the most notable among them, but that isn’t our objective (at least not for today). Instead we will focus on Calhoun, his legacy, and his place in the history of the game.

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Today is John Wooden’s 99th birthday, and RTC would like to recognize the incredible contributions to the game of college basketball with a heartfelt best wishes to the Wizard of Westwood as he creeps one year closer to the century mark. 

Leave your cynical Sam Gilbert jokes at home today – the man still had to win with those teams, and win he did.  88 in a row at one point.  Ten national titles in twelve years.  Sick numbers that we will never, ever, ever come close to seeing accomplished again in the game. 

He also did it with class and dignity, as exhibited for the umpteenth time when he was interviewed by ESPN’s Rick Reilly earlier this week.  His “three rules” harkens back to a bygone era. 

We left our wishes on his birthday guest book page; you should do the same.  Happy Birthday, Coach Wooden!!