|
From the Raleigh News Observer,
"If the NCAA can't punish North Carolina for decades of what was clearly, to any outsider, academic fraud designed to keep athletes eligible, what's the point? Already exposed as feeble and inept by the FBI, which shed more light on the seedy side of basketball recruiting in one pun-laden press conference than the NCAA ever has, Friday's admission that it has no way to punish North Carolina for decades of self-described scandal opens the door to fake classes everywhere.
As of Friday, there's no reason for any athlete to be called a “student-athlete” anymore. They're just athletes, because the NCAA is powerless to enforce the other half of its beloved phrase.
And not necessarily by choice, either. The infractions committee clearly wanted to find some way to penalize UNC but found itself pinned between its own mission and the university's clever lawyering. University presidents, who run the NCAA and make its rules, don't want the NCAA poking around in academics, what they insist on calling “curriculum,” leaving it up to the schools to decide what is and what isn't academic fraud.
North Carolina figured out, in mid-investigation, that even if it called what happened in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies “academic fraud” when dealing with its academic accreditor, as long as it didn't use those words with the NCAA, there was nothing the NCAA could do. So UNC started coming up with all kinds of other ways to describe the classes – “pivoted dramatically,” the report says – and left the committee on infractions a prisoner of its own bylaws."
|
