North Carolina Basketball: Tar Heels celebrates as no sanctions arrive

How we arrived to today

This has been years in the making, as the initial investigation surrounding the football program started in 2014. That would make it over three years to complete the inquiry about the fake classes and illegal benefits it provides student athletes.

How it takes years to do this is beyond me. This wasn’t a multi episode of Law and Order where new clues were coming out every step of the way. Once it’s been determined that the classes were a sham, you find out who took it and find out if the athletics department knew about it and sanction them accordingly. That takes maybe a year, but hey, there are benefits to taking time.

The report is based off a the now-disbanded African and Afro-American Studies Department, which only required a couple of easy papers per semester for students to get high grades. It’s been alleged that from 1993-2011, over 3,000 students benefited from doing next to nothing for A’s.

Where this concerns the NCAA is that about half of those who took those classes were part of the Men’s and Women’s basketball teams as well as the football program, all of which are revenue-producing sports.

The dispute between the school and the NCAA is the jurisdiction of this investigation. North Carolina claims that this is an academic issue and that the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges has already placed them school on a one year probation, but NCAA has still stepped in.

The NCAA has argued that either the Athletics Department either knowingly steered its players to those classes to guarantee their eligibility, or turned a blind eye to what was going on.