I don't care at all about college sports, in part because I don't enjoy watching lower-quality athletes compete in games where higher-quality competition exists.* I also find the whole "student-athlete" thing to be vaguely absurd, especially with regard to basketball and football. No one believes that your dumb-dumb power forward or tight end is there to get his degree, College Sports Booster. Quit with the charade.
That being said, even I—a remarkably jaded individual who thinks that college athletes should just be paid already so we can quit pretending that they care about things like "reading" or "being given a chance to improve their lot in life via the power of education"—was shocked by the UNC academic scandal that has unfolded over the last few years. I mean, this is amazingly brazen stuff:
In 2011, an academic counselor named Mary Willingham began telling Dan Kane, an investigative reporter with The News & Observer in Raleigh, that North Carolina athletes were being steered to sham independent studies classes that never met. Students were required only to turn in a paper that did not even have to be literate. The paper classes went back as far as the 1990s. The grades the athletes were given were always high enough to ensure they were eligible to play.
Incredibly, given that most of these athletes were black, the fraud was being run out of what is now called the Department of African, African-American and Diaspora Studies. The two people orchestrating the fake classes were Julius Nyang’oro, the department head, and Deborah Crowder, the longtime department administrator.
Although the university initially claimed that the scandal had nothing to do with athletics, that was untrue. Kenneth L. Wainstein, a prominent lawyer, issued an authoritative report in October 2014 that noted that nearly half the students in the paper classes were athletes, "even though student-athletes make up just over 4 percent" of the student body. When they were interviewed by Wainstein’s investigators, Nyang’oro and Crowder said that their motivation was to help struggling students, especially "that subset of student-athletes who came to campus without adequate academic preparation."
Faced with such remarkable corruption, most schools would self-impose sanctions in an effort to head off more severe punishment by the NCAA. UNC's basketball team did not do this. Indeed, they did not feel the need to do ... much of anything, really. Roy Williams basically said "Ah, screw it" and went ahead with the season. He seems pretty confident that the university won't be punished for, you know, totally corrupting the school's academic standing:
Williams maintained in the Katz interview, as he has throughout the season and in press-conference appearances throughout March, that his basketball program has "no allegations against them." Indeed, the principal allegations in the June 2015 notice of allegations included two against two of the particular academic department employees involved in the issue, neither of whom works at the school any longer and neither of whom was principally employed by the athletic department.
So, basically, UNC feels it is likely going to skate for funneling idiot, functionally illiterate athletes into a fake academic program that was open to non-students, thus calling the school's whole accreditation into question in an effort to keep winning at minor league sports. And UNC's fans, as best as I can tell, are kind of like "eh, whatever, everyone does it."
When man's law fails, something must fill the void:
Maybe there is a God after all.
*This is why I don't care about the WNBA or MLS, either.