North Carolina Basketball: Tar Heels not unpunished in NCAA academic scandal
North Carolina Basketball might still have its banners, but the NCAA investigation still hurt the Heels in real ways.
On Friday, the NCAA Committee on Infractions came out and ruled its findings in the manner of the North Carolina Tar Heels and their lengthy academic fraud scandal. It ultimately found that the Tar Heels committed nothing that the NCAA could punish it for, recognizing that curriculum building was outside the purview of the NCAA — that included North Carolina Basketball.
To punish North Carolina for wrongdoing that was not strictly athletic would have put the NCAA in a quagmire of situations in the future. They would have to put themselves in the role of curriculum auditors and have to check and make sure every course at every NCAA institution met a certain standard. The Af-Am program at UNC might have been egregious, but regulating it would also mean checking in on every ‘Rocks for Jocks’ course and every strange major at every institution. By the way, those courses exist at every institution, they are just more careful about it than UNC.
That is not what the NCAA was designed to do. It was designed to police the athletics portion only. It does not want more responsibility. Many believe that the NCAA is bad at its own job already. They don’t see what role the group plays other than a shell company for the billions of dollars in revenue it makes every year.
To combat this perception of incompetence, the NCAA makes big shows of principle that can conflict with their mission. They came down hard on Penn State over Jerry Sandusky, but they were operating on the fringes of their authority and they knew it. UNC received a three-year investigation because they might have to act, and the NCAA wanted to look good doing it. In the end, they realized they were limited by their own guidelines.
Some people will look at this decision as a big win for North Carolina. This is hardly true. The program gets to breathe again. The Carolina Way of Dean Smith has been tarnished. Opposing fans will suspect the Tar Heels of dirty tactics or shady deals. Rival fans will thump their chests at how they always knew that hypocrisy was the biggest product in Chapel Hill.
Then, there are the actual ramifications of the investigation. With the rumors of death hanging over the program, Carolina athletics have not been able to recruit effectively for three years or more. It is easy to point at the football team (although they were never in any real danger) to show this. Coach Larry Fedora’s program had no depth behind the good crust of the last few years, and they are 1-5 right now.
Women’s basketball was the most directly hit. They were the big victim of the second letter of allegations when the NCAA tried to be lenient (by only targeting the women and other lesser-earning sports) in the hope that the Heels would accept their authority to punish. The result was the dismantling of Sylvia Hatchell’s squad and the transfer of the highest skill players. Hatchell lost some years of recruiting work and relevance, again for technically nothing.
Men’s basketball was hit too. The school that once snagged Harrison Barnes from Duke couldn’t win on the topmost level of recruits. The biggest loss in that trend was Brandon Ingram. Ingram was raised in Kinston and went through the Jerry Stackhouse school of basketball. There was never a more gettable top recruit for the Heels. He chose Duke. Without him, the Heels go to the National Championship and lose on the last shot. Would he have carried them over Villanova? We never find out.
This recruiting season, Kevin Knox opted to share the ball at Kentucky with a boatload of other prospects because he didn’t know what the NCAA would do. The five-star recruit that committed to the Tar Heels for 2018, Nassir Little, came on board after Miami came under the FBI investigation.
Next: North Carolina Avoids Major Sanctions
North Carolina has not come out of this process unscathed. They have been put through recruiting purgatory over the last few years and were fortunate to have a good core in men’s basketball before it all started. They have been sanctioned by SACS. The program was not ‘killed’ by the NCAA, but it has been damaged in the process in ways no real follower of college sports could ignore.