More analysis to come, but here quickly are the salient points from the press conference with Chancellor Thorp, AD Baddour, and Coach Davis:
- An investigation into academic impropriety has been opened. There are now two prongs to the investigation into the UNC.
- UNC is taking the lead (and inferred sole discretion) on the academic investigation with the NCAA’s blessing.
- The academic piece was discovered during player interviews about the agent investigation.
- The academic concerns have just been discovered.
- Baddour has assembled a team including the current and former faculty athletic representatives, compliance office, and legal counsel’s office to look into the academic matters.
- There is no timeline on the academic side of the investigation. It seems likely it will not be resolved before the LSU game.
- The tutor involved had worked for Butch Davis and his family as an academic tutor for his son Drew, a high school junior. She apparently worked with UNC’s academic athletic support at some point as well.
- Davis received a vote of confidence from both Baddour and Thorp. Read into that what you will.
Other than that, it was 25 minutes of not a whole lot. Thorp assured that academic integrity was paramount and that UNC would get to the bottom of this. Baddour revealed how they found out there was academic problems but would not elaborate on how many players were involved or how long this might take. He reiterated that Carolina has significant education about agents and guidelines for academic support. Davis acknowledged the elephant in the room right off, saying the tutor in question once worked for his family.
The bigger point for me is that Carolina has maintained the cone of silence regarding improper contact with agents. But as soon as academic integrity was called into question, the chancellor, AD, and head football coach were out front and center talking to the media, and more important, to alumni and fans. That’s what you want to see in a situation like this.
More to come…
UPDATE(THF): Let me chime in here. So I was right that big news would break with me on vacation I just didn’t think it would be more…er…stuff hitting the proverbial fan. Nothing like picking up your Blackberry for the first time today and reading UNC football is now neck deep in academic infractions. So what happens now? Does Holden Thorp get Dick Baddour, Erskine Bowles and go all Star Trek III on the football program? Do we get a more surgical response that means taking a hammer approach to the guilty players in hopes they can shore up the issue at hand and still maintain the program momentum from a recruiting standpoint? Everyone says they support Butch Davis but generally when that comes from the AD or Chancellor it usually does not end well. That might not be the case here but public votes of confidence from the administration have long been considered bad omens. Doc is correct, you want to see Thorp and company out there dealing with this. It is clear they ain’t fooling around which also means no one will bat an eye if they do blow up the Enterprise.
Whatever happens, as UNC fans all we want is for someone to make this right and for UNC to do the right thing regardless of results. If that means dismissing players, so be it. This newest twist also will result in additional garbage flung from the ABC side of the room which is expected and possibly a little sad but that is the cost of doing business. All I want is someone to make this all go away…please…I’m begging you.
Exit question: Does William Friday’s ranting against big business college athletics look more sane than it did two months ago?
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body language, facial expressions were not good.
way to go butch. all that money for what?
OK class, we’re going to skip this unit and go straight to Late Night with Roy.
^^ and on the same day a new System Prez was named, who will likely want to weigh in on this. Not looking good for Butch for sure.
I guess they were free to talk about this because there was no NCAA gag order about academic cheating.
This is so much worse than going to a party on an agent’s dime, in my opinion.
^ ^Why would winning only 8 games with a dirty team have Butch concerned?
/sarcasm
If this is all true, it’s time for a vote of no confidence in Butch Davis. Time to give him the boot.
To say that he didn’t know anything about agent contacts is one thing. But to say he didn’t know anything about this is another. This now calls to question the remarkable turnaround in Miami, and I can’t say that my feelings would be hurt if he were give his walking papers before the season started.
I’m the first to acknowledge that the Torbush and Bunting years were about as fun as an appendectomy without anastesia, but I would much rather have a team to root for that wins four or five games and be clean rather than an FSU or USC type program that is able to be good while being dirty.
It’s now time to go back to the bottom of the ACC. At least now we won’t have to deal with underperforming with great talent and we can finally accept the subpar record for what it really is.
Nice job, Butch. Hope you’re happy with yourself, and I hope that the powers that be have the stones to do something NOW. This is where you find out who has actualy integrity and who is all talk.
yer right scl, there’s always Yates to blame.
Let’s not pull a Duke lacrosse. There is plenty to worry about, but not much by way of proof or even specific allegations.
All depending on what comes out, Davis might have to go, and players might have to be suspended or expelled. If the proof is there, so be it. It will be a black day for Carolina, but there will be no choice.
Still, that day is not yet upon us. Let everyone tell his side of the story, then let the chips fall where they may.
I’m with Rathskellar68. This is not Butch’s fault — It’s the fault of one kid who wanted to be cool with the football team a little too much and the fault of a couple players who’ve come to believe they’re too special and their fecal matter has no aroma.
At this point in Agent-gate the entire defense was under investigation, and that’s definitely changed. This is not SMU. And I can’t imagine Butch would knowingly do anything considering he saw the aftermath of such actions in Miami.
I’m with Rath, just chill out on Butch for the moment. He did great work remaking the U clean and doing it the right way. I can see that he would have a Nanny/Tutor given the amount of travel and work he does, you want to leave your kid with some stranger. It has to just kill him to take a hit from inside his own circle of trust. Still this is an ugly situation and I agree that it is worse than agent-gate in my mind. That said I’m not going to lay this at his feet, you want him to grade papers or coach football. This is why we have this great academic support program which is run by the AD and his department. This is the same program you have across all of the teams. Same reason that FSU was so screwed as it was the entire athletic program.
I was at the stadium today running the stairs and it was completely empty. NO cars, no players, just about nobody. Of course they are pressure washing the seats and stadium so that makes sense but still, it was crazy all over campus today and oddly quiet in Kenan.
My favorite part of managing the spin – Basketball Season Tickets are on sale which was broadcast via email no less than 15 minutes after the press conference ended. Act now as the renewal deadline is the 17th.
I’m going to quit caring about this, I trust the school and the coach to sort this business out. Until it’s done it’s not. I’m still going to Atlanta and I still have to figure out how to get the PS3 to function in the car.
1. You don’t have to suck in athletics to have a clean program. Anyone that wants to return to the Bunting era is welcome to it. Did you experience rampant issues during the Mack Brown era or when Cho Cho was on the field?
2. Friday’s comments about big money athletics are directed at the entire program. So if you want to adhere to his position then you need to shut down men’s basketball as well and perhaps some other areas as well. Does Anson get paid more than most college soccer coaches, how about our baseball coach? There’s no bright lines to define what is too much and just how you run the programs. I think if you can use football and basketball to fund the other programs then you are doing well. Still it’s a school, not a franchise.
Fast Forward Please.
FWIW Despite CBSsports’ report that Charles Brown and Kendric Burney have already been kicked off the team, Burney’s twitter says he’s gotta get up for “practice tomorrow.”..
“Hitting the bed…class in the morning then practice in the afternoon”
Yeah… I’ll wait until everything comes out before I make myself into an ******, and with that we could go back to winning only 4 games again with a “clean” program. If anybody thinks that any Division One program is entirely clean, they are fooling themselves. Every single team has stuff going on behind the scenes that never gets discovered. I’m sure there has been a lot more than essay writing from a tutor going on, that we will never hear about from UNC.
http://www.vegasinsider.com/college-football/story.cfm/story/1032820
Don’t know if true, but hopefully that’s it if it is….
I’m sorry, but we’ve now gotten to the point where we are being asked to suspend an awful lot of disbelief. The agent the NCAA is investigating is friends with one of our assistant coaches, but the assistant coach knew nothing? The tutor that helped a number of players cheat used to work for Butch Davis’s own family, but Butch knew nothing? It’s true, that all the evidence has not been put on the table yet, and the University should not make any personnel decisions until it is. However, we now know that we are no longer dealing with a situation where wrong doings were enabled by people who had no connections to the University or Coaches, and that is deeply disturbing.
I agree with many of the posters who have said that they’d rather have a middle of the road program (4 to 6 wins each year, and occasionally beat your rival) if it meant that we could rest easy knowing that it was also an honest program
“I agree with many of the posters who have said that they’d rather have a middle of the road program (4 to 6 wins each year, and occasionally beat your rival) if it meant that we could rest easy knowing that it was also an honest program”
^and the ones that don’t? well, I think Winston Churchill said it best.
Look, if it comes out that Butch knew what was going on all along, I’ll be the next to join the “out he goes” bandwagon, but all I’m saying is we have NO CLUE what the tutor’s motivation was.
There were early reports that the tutor was someone who simply wanted to get in good with the football team. If that’s true (and it wouldn’t shock me) then the next most obvious move if you’re that person is to get in good with the coach and what better way to do that then to tutor his son? People like that exist and there’s nothing that the coach or the AD or the Chancellor or John Swofford or even the NCAA president can do about it. I have seen a lot of people do a lot of stupid things of purely their own accord, strictly for the purposes of getting in good with a specific group of people.
I am now officially disappointed. I was ok with agent-gate, but now this? The combination of the two investigations tells me one thing, this is not going to be the season we had hoped for and our expectations should be lowered considerably.
I hate to be negative and I haven’t been until now, but this is going to end badly. This is a major disappointment and I never imagined anything like this happening at Carolina…
Davis may not be at fault here, and I am not pointing any fingers, but this is his team and he has to absorb some of the blame. He is their leader and their disciplinarian.
Disappointed doesn’t really cover how I’m feeling right now. Talk about let down. It’s one thing to have expectations based on false hope and fandome – see 2010 basketball. It’s another to have the program eat itself alive. I think the biggest issue is my level of exposure to the entire saga. That really goes for all of us on this blog. The very fact that you post here, read the articles makes you someone that uses the internet for news and information. Even better you visit blogs and consume information at an hourly pace. Your Dad might have opened the paper every morning and taken in the news of the day maybe discussed it at work a few times, but now we can experience something like this 1,000 times a day. Devoid of new content on this site I could just check the posts. The death of a 1,000 cuts experienced every hour on the hour. Thanks Al Gore.
I am simply going to wait and see what the end results will be. I admit it does not look good for Butch Davis or this football program. As an old alum, I have experienced good and bad moments from various sports teams in the past. None of the bad has lessened my love for this University and for the pride that I feel in having earned a degree from one ofhe best public universities in this nation. We will survive!
Go Heels!!