And we wait…
Just a blogging note. We would love to actually cover the football side of things with a nice preview of the season, predictions. Doc started last week with a preview of the schedule before the train went right off the tracks following the revelations of possible academic violations. It is pretty much impossible for us to discuss what kind of season UNC is going to have since we have no idea who is going to take the field for the Heels at any point this season. The worst case is most of the defense ends up being deep sixed along with Greg Little. Best case is 2-3 guys at most, maybe for only a few games. With that kind of uncertainty we really cannot make an accurate prediction at this point. We could speak hypothetically which was easier if you were speaking of only Marvin Austin or Greg Little. With so many other players out there who could miss games writing a preview would be too much like trying to nail jello to a wall.
As far as latest news goes there really isn’t any. According to ACC Now, Marvin Austin broke his silence via Facebook last night or at least by all accounts it appears to be Austin.
“I came back to school to have my character questioned..[expletive]..i thought education was key.. I dont really understand…i though it was the right thing to do..maybe i was mistaken,” the message said. “…i like to say thanx to all those who stand by me i really appriecate [sic] it. oh yea and to those who wanna see me fall i wont cause i dont great athletes stay on their feet!!!!!
Read into that what you will. It sounds a bit like a farewell 0f sorts, especially with the “thank you” to those who supported Austin. It is unclear if Austin knows his fate at this point but most of the signs still point to either a length suspension(four games) or something worse.
As for the rest of the team, Robbi Pickeral at the N&O indicated player travel to Atlanta would be contingent on which rules were broken: UNC or NCAA.
Depending on how deep the inquiries have gone, players could be tagged for breaking NCAA rules, school rules or both.
If a player is ineligible for competition per NCAA guidelines, the school cannot pay for any travel expenses, UNC senior associate athletic director Larry Gallo explained via e-mail Sunday. If the player travels on his own dime, the NCAA allows him to be on the sideline at the school’s discretion, but not in uniform.
However, if a player is suspended for breaking a school rule, but remains eligible for competition per NCAA guidelines, he can travel with the team and can be in uniform, if the school permits.
The institution makes those sideline/uniform decisions on an individual, case-by-case basis, Gallo wrote.
Butch Davis said in his press conference players will travel if they can play. That being said, Dick Baddour said last week they could end up clearing players right up to game day which stands to reason players will travel unless they know they are not going to be cleared by Saturday.
Now this UNC rules vs NCAA rules gets into an area that I have been tossing around in my head all weekend. When UNC discovered the tutor’s name via a player interview, they informed the NCAA there could be academic issues and the NCAA blessed UNC’s efforts to track down the infractions. The question I had was why the NCAA is allowing UNC to take the lead on this? The answer is no one knows for sure whose rules were broken. The NCAA has rules pertaining to athlete academic eligibility[Note: This info comes from a document dated 2-3 years ago, standards may have changed.] There is the initial determination when the athlete enters school. Once an athlete has matriculated there are also minimal GPA, number of hours attempted/credits earned per semester and progress towards graduation requirements. In your freshman year you need to have a GPA of 1.8 or higher to be eligible. The NCAA rules slide the GPA up so by your senior season you need a 2.0 to be eligible for competition. What the NCAA does not get into is how those grades are attained. As long as you are earning sufficient grades according to the school grading standards , take the correct number of hours, earn the minimal number of credits and show degree progress, you are eligible in the eyes of the NCAA. On top of the NCAA rules, the school generally has rules for athletes to help them stay ahead of the NCAA rules. For example, when I was at UNC Greensboro all freshman athletes were required to attend study hall a few nights a week during their first semester. If an athlete posted a GPA of 2.0 or higher then you were excused from study hall unless your GPA dropped back below 2.0. Then you have the general academic rules that apply to all students commonly known as the honor code. If a player were to violate the school honor code and get caught that would obviously have an impact on their grades, credits earned, etc.
Take this current case(and note I am speculating here.) If UNC Player A submitted a paper written by a former tutor during the 2010 spring semester and has now been caught then UNC would follow its own policies to deal with the student in question. The result might be voiding his grades which could kill his GPA, cost him needed credits, etc thus making him ineligible by NCAA rules. Since the player has yet to play in a game since the infraction occurred the compliance office would deem them ineligible and the NCAA would not take action. However, if UNC Player A committed honor code violations in the 2009 spring semester and UNC executes discipline which renders them ineligible according to NCAA standards then you have a larger issue. Since said player would have played for UNC during the 2009 football season the NCAA would have to step in and make a ruling for use of an ineligible player. In short, UNC is presently conducting an internal review of possible academic violations of university policy with an eye towards NCAA rules. If UNC uncovers violations that create eligibility issues in past games then it becomes an NCAA issue. If UNC finds widespread corruption in their academic support program affecting multiple sports that will require NCAA intervention as well. Of course it is probably easier for UNC to use its staff to deal with professors and what not than the NCAA which is another reason why this is being handled in house first before turning it over to the NCAA.
Bearing that in mind, the other question I have is whether the tutor in question was employed by UNC at the time she allegedly assisted players or was she acting as an independent person who knew the players from her previous position with the academic support program? It is an important distinction. If she was outside the academic support role then it is likely that part of the athletic department is clean. At that point you are talking about a situation where players are using 3rd party individuals to get their academic work done. Is that shocking that players would use fellow or former students to help them with papers? Probably not since the same thing happens across the student population as a whole. Raise your hand if you have ever done school work for a friend or had a friend do something for you? How many of you have copied off another test paper in the room, use a cheat sheet and generally cut corners because you did not study the night before? My point is it happens. It happens at UNC. It happens everywhere. Now, UNC should not get a pass on this because someone decided to flip the log over to discover any number of nasty creatures underneath. These are the breaks more or less. This is like sitting in a group of ten cars on the interstate running 15 mph over the speed limit and because you have an expired tag the police single you out for the ticket. UNC had one issue crop up and it lead other issues being discovered. This is what happens when the NCAA starts digging around. The seedy underbelly gets exposed and since it is out there for the world to see, it must be dealt with. In an ideal world you hope your team is maintaining a high standard where these kinds of issues are concerned. For the most part I think UNC does it right in the areas they can control. Again, this is why it is important to know whether the individual accused of aiding players was on her own or still employed. The latter is under UNC’s control but what she does or did on her own is not. When you are talking about players going off on their own to get work done by individuals outside the official system how does anyone police that? In some respects it is the same issue as agent contact. You can educate the players, you can encourage them to do the right thing. You can offer them all the assistance the rules allow in hopes they do not feel the need to act in an illicit manner. However at the end of the day we all find out any given athletic season is hinged on 18-22 year old athletes making good choices.
With those odds it is a wonder more schools aren’t in trouble than we see now.
Author’s Note: Just a further, explicit disclaimer. It is the position of THF that UNC should follow all NCAA rules and the athletes wearing the uniform should do the same. We also believe that if anyone breaks NCAA or university rules they should be punished accordingly. Just because everyone is doing it does not mean UNC should nor should they be excused. However, we also acknowledge that in a world where moral compromises are easily brokered rules will be bent or crushed in the name of expediency, laziness and the almighty dollar. We wish it were different and we hope this leads to real reform. And yes, we’d be lying if we were not a tad frustrated UNC got caught but as stated above, those are the breaks. The only thing UNC can do now is the right thing which actually has more to do with PR than anything else but that is sad discussion for another time.
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Good post THF. In summary, I desire and do expect UNC “to do the right thing”. Anything less would be a great disservice to our great University Of North Carolina.
Go Heels!!
This may be the stupidest thing that I have ever seen in my entire life. If the NCAA continues on this road, voiding championships and apparently, voiding seasons in the middle of seasons, they are going to see this thing come back to bite them in the proverbial ******.
Why should anyone bother to watch their “championships” if they are going to be voided? It is a waste of time and money and you can’t even drink at their events, so why even bother? Maybe I will just stick with the NFL and the NBA. The players are far better and you don’t have to deal with this penny ante crap.
^well. that is a response i didnt expect to read, especially from william.
good post, THF. and for the record, i didnt get to raise my hand.
i dont think MA’s tweet sounds like a goodbye thank you. i didnt get that sense. and he didnt say “stood”, he said “stand”, present tense.
so far, i havent thought of anything to push me off my hope that it takes a long time to find and compare all the schoolwork that might be in question, and that not all players will be found guilty of anything.
^ & ^^ Wow, a little surprised but not taken completely off guard as william had been silent for so long on the issue but I understand his thoughts on the matter. It’s frustrating because we care so much and because when you consider the NCAA it’s just a big faceless corporation and common sense doesn’t have a seat at the table there or in government. Regardless we all want this dealt with appropriately and let’s move on.
I do feel bad for Marvin, I think he’s a nice guy and seems to be a real family man as far as his Mom and little sister are concerned. If he made a bad decision well so be it, I like the guy and will endure the punishment just as he will as will.
Great post THF, some of the best writing I’ve seen on the whole issue, I’m going to go Rip Van Winkle on this issue, wake me up when it’s over…well except for that drive to Atlanta and all. Maybe the Offense will turn up and light up the sky with 30+ points in the air and 20+ points on the ground.
At least I didn’t mention the Gorn…oh well.
On a second issue, we were assured that this new football administration was not going to embarrass the school. I know Miami is in our conference but let’s face it. Miami has a lousy reputation for compliance. I would rather be 5-5 every year than deal with this stuff ruining the rest of our programs and reputation. This really needs to end now. If something below UNC’s standards of the last 50 years has been done, then it is sayanora time. If it is penny ante, then it needs to end, so we are not left twisting in the wind, and if the NCAA can’t rouse itself, what the hell good is it anyway?
It may be time to split football off from all of the other collegiate sports and let football have its own ridiculous conferences and recruiting and scandals and phony national title. It is crazy to let football determine baseball and soccer match-ups between teams 1000 miles apart.
Yeah, it’s clear this is all totally due to Butch’s desire to get us to the big time. I’m pretty sure we’ve never had a player accept any improper gifts or had a player turn in work that was prepared by someone else, until Butch and his staff came.
^uh, what?
looks like the U is going to be sweating it out pretty soon.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/08/29/1797096/new-book-to-allege-violations.html
Is that sarcasm? So no NCAA violations since the beginning of the Dean Smith era in football and basketball was just due to good cover-ups?
As someone once said “where there is smoke, there is fire”.
That is not a literal statement, but people who tend to engage in infractions tend to get caught more.
apparently what got overlooked is that “clean program in Miami” is a relative phrase.
at least Butch left Miami after 2000. may have dodged another public relations problem there.
Great that Marvin went on Facebook to make a statement, when the whole thing started with his dumba** tweeting in the club. Marvin can be a great person, but the kid is a moron, STOP GETTING ON SOCIAL NETWORKS MARVIN, and quit with the haters crap. You brought this one yourself, now deal with the consequences. Sadly he’ll still get paid, and UNC will have to deal with his mistakes.
At least TJ wont be to blame this year, he should be happy about that. UNC football at best is average, and thats ok, but sanctions are not.
BBLB –
Rip Van Winkle sounds good. The problem with this stuff is it’s like a trainwreck. You can’t look, and you can’t not look.
Anybody got a time machine? Not to go forward, to go back, to November 2008. Hansbrough, Hansbrough, Hansbrough.
The current news is so bad it makes me long for the days when the big debate here was whether Lawson should sit on account of The Toe.
Help!
MakeitWayne is right. Now, if UNC does have a good year, people will say we improved via cheating.
No competitive advantage was gained from Austin/Little taking a paid trip to Miami or players cheating on papers. If we were talking about recruiting violations or improper benefits coming from the school to attract elite players then you might have something. But this does not fit the definition of improving via cheating.
Well this sucks. I had such high hopes for this year and now I have no idea whether we will even have a team this year.
I’m in full agreement with rath on this one. All we can do is think back to the days when our most worrisome problem was a toe…
I find this a very disturbing article. It is an elaborate attempt to rationalize away any serious ramifications for, presumably, academic cheating. (Others students have done it, it’s happened in other programs, football is no worse than soccer or basketball, etc.) The situation is a good deal simpler, in my opinion: if the student is guilty of academic cheating (such as an academic honor code violation, but not limited to honor court proceedings), he/she should be kicked off the team and, for honor code offenses, given the appropriate punishment (failing grade, kicked out of school, etc.) as prescribed for that offense. The academic integrity of the University demands no less, and I think that was the message Holden Thorpe was giving Friday. What should be done prior to such a determination is less clear, but should probably be based on a reasonable determination of the likelihood of guilt — probably guilty, at least suspended from the team until final determination is made.
jbs,
Except I state in at least two places I think the guilty should be punished. I am more or less pointing out the reality of what goes on and not so much trying to rationalize anything. The significant question for me is whether these infractions occurred as a result of corruption in academic support or was it players using someone outside the support program? For my money I think UNC handles the aspects it can control as well as anyone. I think they educated the players on agent contact. I think the academic support program is clean(unlike what happened at FSU) However in both areas the great X factor is the actions of the players and propensity for these players to make mistakes. That is the part UNC or any school would have a tough time controlling. Players, like any other student, are going to cheat and the only reason it came to light here is because of the agent issue. I am not condoning it, I am just saying it happens and I hope UNC is doing all it can to help athletes do their school work and get their degree.
I also agree with you that if violations are found then UNC needs to deal with it accordingly. If that is suspensions or dismissals so be it. The sticky part of this is if you discover such infractions in the past then you run afoul of the NCAA. Still Thorp should be applauded for taking a hard line and setting a high standard. It won’t stop all of it but the expectation should be set nonetheless to ensure the academic support program and the faculty are doing their job as it pertains to the student athletes.
I was talking about perception, not reality in terms of what people will claim made us better. I guess it is best to reserve comments until we know more, but this kind of thing will always be endemic to football due to the sheer number of guys that are necessary to field a program.
If we are to aspire to Ivy League academic standards, we may get stuck with Ivy League-type athletic teams. That might be heresy, but it’s something we need to confront.
At one time, Carolina was near-Ivy League in its academic reputation and was widely recognized as the best university in the South. Years of unconscionable cutbacks by the state legislature have pushed us back. This year we are ranked 30th overall, behind Dook, UVA and now Wake for cryin’ out loud, and that’s just in the ACC.
There are very few top-tier academic schools that frequently field really good athletic teams. Stanford, my law school alma mater, is the one that comes to mind. Maybe Texas.
There has always been a lurking problem with having really talented guys on the team that you knew, or could reasonably suspect, were not doing quality academic work and probably had no interest in doing it. What is going on now is that we may have come a cropper of that reality.
The thought that we might have to choose between top-notch academics and top-notch athletics is highly unappetizing. Someone, please, show me that I’m wrong.
^For the most part I agree with what you say. However, I do cling to the belief (perhaps very naively) that the large rosters on football teams are the root of this problem. I think (or hope) you can still maintain both academic integrity and athletic excellence on the teams that have small enough rosters for the coaches to really get to know their players, and also in the non-revenue sports where there is less temptation (no agents, no runners, no worries about overzealous tutors, etc.)
I guess what I’m doing is really just making a long winded argument that UNC can still have a good basketball team and some good non revenue programs, while still maintaining high academic and ethical standard. Or maybe even that is a naive idea?
^ I don’t think that is naive, and in fact that is basically the way it has been at UNC for decades. I see no reason to destroy that because we want a successful football team, assuming that recent issues are indicative of what it takes to field a successful team (though I’m not sure that is the case).
If we are going to get into the issues of college academics in general, goodness, that is a can of worms. W&L and University of Chicago abolished major college athletics to focus on academics. We could get rid of recruiting but we all know what would happen then.
Ultimately, and I think soon, both college sports and the business of college education are both going to come crashing down. It has been proven that home schooling, which is virtually free in terms of out of pocket costs, can produce learning results equal to traditional methods. So basically, kids today are paying exorbitant prices for a small amount of personal contact with professors and for certification, as a graduate.
The recent inflation is mindboggling, however. In state tuition at Virginia law schools has gone up more than 200 percent in only 15 years. UNC’s law tuition has apparently skyrocketed as well. Decent but not particularly exclusive schools like Wofford and Furman are charging over 150 K for a degree, and of course, unlike bank loans, those student notes are not dischargeable in bankruptcy. I know they give rebates, which is a classic monopolistic tactic, but I am not sure that schools should be engaging in wealth redistribution.
It is sad to see, but apparently, this is what happens when we apply a market economy rubric to education, which has generally been seen as a duty of first churches, and now the state, but not a field where profit maximization should be the prevailing standard, particularly given the large barriers to entry.
The parallels with medicine are apparent, with the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish hospitals being swallowed by corporations with names like Carolina Medical Center and Inova.
I personally have no interest in how much money football theoretically brings into the University. I am sure most of it is plowed right back into salaries and goodies, while the overall effect is to demean what should be the University’s central focus and core mission.
Something is going to give here and a lot of these middle of the road expensive schools will either be merging or ceasing to exist. Right now, with the possible except of Harvard and Yale, I don’t think I would advise anyone to attend a private or out of state school unless they were wealthy to the point where the tuition paid was meaningless.
Boy, that sure seems to be the way we’re heading in everything these days. Got a difficult problem? Throw the baby out with the bathwater. How does Rutgers, or UGa manage? Dare I say it, even Cutcliffe seems to have Duke headed in the right direction(s).
Where is the “win/win” spirit of problem solving anymore? Was it just a figment I had growing up, or have we really lost that ability of creative problem solving? Or maybe win/win only works when selfishness & greed don’t overwhelm it. I really think we have. Rant over-carry on…
one positive is that there is an actual game on Saturday, and we can get back to complaining about Yates throwing the ball 10 ft over Highsmith’s head, instead of this crap everyday. At this point, its time to move on, and lets see what we got.
^^Sorry 52bgJ… I don’t mean to be overly pessimistic but man, the Torbush Era, the Bunting Era and now Butch’s contribution… our football program has just been one disaster after another for the past decade. Who hired those guys? Oh that’s right…