Bad sports, good sports: NCAA fails to punish UNC for academic fraud
Somebody needs to explain the NCAA to me. Seriously, I am obviously not equipped to comprehend its rules, policies, and methods of determining punishment. Everyone knows what happened at Penn State, or at least people think they know. The Nittany Lions were hit with stunningly severe sanctions for the Jerry Sandusky situation, despite the fact that no NCAA rules were broken. On Friday, it was announced that the NCAA had concluded its investigation of accusations of academic fraud at the University of North Carolina and had found no evidence of wrongdoing. If you have read anything about this situation, you are as astonished by this as I am.
UNC had courses that never existed. Guidance counselors directed athletes to these courses. Transcripts showed clear evidence of preferential treatment for athletes. This sounds like it would be right in the wheelhouse of the NCAA, doesn’t it? Is this not the entire reason that it exists at all? How is it possible that no penalties are forthcoming? The NCAA has been accused of having dealt with its constituency in an arbitrary fashion for years, but this one takes the cake, especially so close upon the heels of the Penn State rulings. The most outrageous and inaccurate part of NCAA president Mark Emmert’s grandstanding about Penn State was the ludicrous assertion the the culture in Happy Valley was placing athletics over academics. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the data backs up my statement. In this UNC situation, it is absolutely clear that athletics were being placed above academics in the most straightforward way possible. Athletes were getting grades for classes that simply didn’t exist! The NCAA decided, though, that this was a university issue, not an athletics issue, so it did not have jurisdiction. The hypocrisy makes my head explode. I wonder if the fact that North Carolina has one of the biggest basketball programs in the country has anything to do with this. After all, the NCAA actually runs and profits from the NCAA Basketball Tournament. It does not own the BCS and makes nothing off of the whole bowl system in college football. The Penn State punishment came after a great deal of screaming and calling for blood by the media, led by ESPN’s constant and seemingly biased coverage. For this UNC scandal, there has been very little coverage at all. Could the fact that ESPN’s president, John Skipper, graduated from North Carolina have anything to do with that?
I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, I really do. I promise I am not wearing a tinfoil hat. Nothing makes sense, though, and there must be some kind of reason for that. I have read that the UNC investigation is not actually over, and that there could still be a finding more grounded in reality once the rest of the research is completed. I sure hope so. I don’t like to be the guy that wishes ill on others simply because something bad has happened to me or to something close to me, but it is impossible, considering the complete miscarriage of justice that occurred back in July, for me to keep quiet when the NCAA fails to act on legitimate and obvious violations.
Bad sports. continued:
2) A German man who was officiating a high school track and field meet in Dusseldorf was killed when he was hit in the throat by a thrown javelin. Dieter Strack was 74.
3) A man fell to his death from an escalator at Reliant Stadium in Houston on Thursday during the Texans’ final preseason game against the Minnesota Vikings. It seems that sliding down the handrail of an escalator is not such a good idea.
4) While we are on the subject of falls at stadiums, a fan of the Tennessee Volunteers who was at the Georgia Dome to watch the Vols play NC State on Friday night fell from the front row of an upper deck and landed on a fan sitting down below. Both men were hospitalized.
5) The Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy football team had to forfeit its opening football game last week because the equipment, which had been sent for reconditioning, had not yet made its way back to the school. Oops.
6) Allen Pinkett, a former Notre Dame football player who now broadcasts Fighting Irish games on the radio, was suspended from the broadcast team for the team’s opening game after he made statements suggesting that the team would benefit from having some criminals, which he also called “bad citizens,” playing for it.
7) George Huguely, the University of Virginia lacrosse player who famously killed his girlfriend back in 2010, was sentenced to 23 years in prison this week by a jury in Maryland. This strikes me as far too lenient.
8) Kent State linebacker Andre Parker’s heart must have been racing on Thursday when he grabbed a blocked punt and took off running. Hilariously, though, he ran the wrong way and was headed toward his own end zone. The really baffling part of this play was the fact that not one, but two Towson players chased him and knocked him out of bounds before he could get there.
Good sports:
1) Major League Baseball has a new youngest player, and he started with a bang. Jurickson Profar (how’s that for a name??), just 19 years old and the league’s top overall prospect according to ESPN, hit a homerun in his first Major League at-bat on Sunday during the Texas Rangers’ game against the Cleveland Indians.
Bad sports, good sports appears every Monday
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Alan, good post … though really long on the ‘bad sports’ side. Thanks for sharing, nonetheless.
I am also scratching my head over the NCAA and UNC … I can’t help to go back many, MANY years to my time at the University of New Mexico, and a similar scandal involving our beloved Lobo Men’s Basketball program.
Back in those days, the NCAA was a harsh taskmaster … and, admittedly, we were dealth with appropriately … though we also did not have the stature of a UNC.