DOWN AT THE HEELS

               July usually is a quiet time for college sports, a period in which coaches hide out in dark rooms indulging their game-films obsessions and players take summer classes to make up the credits they can’t get during the fall or spring semesters, when their sports are in season. Boosters are left to their own devices for entertainment, mostly watching TV reruns or speculating about the campaigns ahead.

           

            This year, though, has been lively. The NCAA is defending itself in court over its use of player images in video games and, for a change, is losing. The major conferences are rumbling about making their own rules and threatening to split with the cartel if they don’t get their way.  Rarely a day goes by that a college athlete doesn’t embarrass his school by running afoul of the law, a subject I wrote about a couple of blogs ago. That’s one price the institutions pay for the business they’re in.

            

            The busiest campus is that of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and it wishes it wasn’t. A scandal has been unfolding there that goes back more than 15 years and is appalling even for the cesspool that is college sports. It seems that an entire academic department of the university-- African and Afro-American Studies, or AFAM-- existed mainly to keep jocks eligible for their sports by handing them A’s or B’s for courses that required no class attendance or much other effort. There’s evidence that tutors wrote papers for athletes and, if that failed, grades were changed, sometimes by forging instructors’ signatures. The irregularities date from at least 1997. Since a college generation spans four years, that means it affected about four generations of Tar Heel athletes. That included the school’s 2005 and 2009 national-champion men’s basketball teams.

Some of those allegations were investigated previously by the NCAA, lumped together with those of the more-common sports grist of “impermissible benefits” (i.e., payoffs) to athletes. In 2011 the organization hit the school with penalties to its football program that cost head coach Butch Davis his job, but it determined that the infractions were limited to football and looked no further.  Things might have ended there if two state newspapers—the Raleigh News & Observer and Charlotte Observer—hadn’t kept digging, something that no doubt riled more than a few of their readers and advertisers.

 The papers’ stories uncovered a far-wider mess and resulted in the indictment for fraud of Julius Nyang’oro, the AFAM department chairman from 1992 to 2012, for pocketing $12,000 (on top of his regular yearly salary of $200,000) for teaching a summer course that never met. They also brought forward Mary Willingham, an assistant director of the university’s tutoring arm, who said that pre-written term papers were routinely handed to jocks in several academic disciplines and that for years the university had been keeping eligible athletes who read at grade-school levels.

 Most tellingly, the scandal acquired a face when Rashad McCants, a star of the 2005 hoops-title team, went public in June with allegations that his education at Chapel Hill was a sham, consisting largely of unearned grades achieved in the no-show classes to which he was directed by his coaches and academic advisers. UNC and other schools guard athletes’ grades transcripts like state secrets, but McCants produced a copy of his showing that he’d received  10 A’s, six B’s, one C and one D in his AFAM classes, and six C’s, one D and three F’s in courses outside the department.

“When you go to college you don’t go to class, you don’t do nothing, you just show up and play,” he said on ESPN’s Outside the Lines program. “You’re not there to get an education, though they tell you that. You’re there to make revenue for the college…to put fans in the seats.”

Now the NCAA has reopened its investigation and the university is conducting an inquiry of its own, headed by an ex-U.S. Justice Department official. NCAA and institutional self-investigations often end in whitewashes, but UNC might not have that option. Nyang’oro, who’d refused to talk since his indictment last year, lately has said he’d cooperate with investigators after the criminal charges against him were dropped.  That’s a curious arrangement, indicating that the university’s reach extends into local law enforcement, but he’d likely have many beans to spill should he choose to.

Almost as bad as the charges against UNC has been its reaction to them. Its line has been to blame all irregularities on Nyang’oro and his secretary, and to chide the Carolina newspapers for their reports on the situation. Whistleblower Willingham was stripped of her administrative duties and assigned to shuffle papers in a basement office. She resigned and is suing the school.

Roy Williams, UNC’s much-decorated basketball head coach, channeled Inspector Renault of the movie “Casablanca” by saying at a press conference that he’d reacted to ex-player McCants’ charges with “shock and disbelief.”  “I have somewhat control over the basketball program. I don’t have control of the academic side,” he said in a classic non-denial denial. This is a man who is paid a reported $2.6 million a year to run a 15-player program, and probably knows what his players eat for breakfast every morning. It later came out that six of the 15 young men on Williams’ ’05 squad were AFAM majors, as were many other Tar Heel jocks before and after.

 The affair is especially telling because UNC is one of those chesty schools that likes to brag that it “does things right,” combining classroom and playing-field excellence without breaking the rules of either. The U of Michigan said that before it was learned that Ed Martin, a Detroit numbers racketeer, was the godfather of its Fab Five-era basketball teams.  Notre Dame, too, before it deep-sixed a rape complaint against a footballer by a woman student who committed suicide after the incident, and sent a 20-year-old student manager to his death videotaping football practice from a tower during a windstorm.

As a Southern institution, UNC might have been more sensitive than most to its obligations to the black athletes it has been recruiting only with relative recency. Yes, the players involved were complicit in their own exploitation, but their youth was an excuse their adult advisers lacked.

This is a matter that goes beyond sports, casting doubt on the integrity of a university as a whole. The NCAA shouldn’t be investigating it, the national accrediting bodies should.