The NCAA investigation into the academic fraud that occurred at North Carolina has gone on seemingly forever, but, according to the News & Observer, we may now know why it’s August of 2016 and a resolution appears to be months, if not years, away.
First, a quick timeline: North Carolina received their initial Notice of Allegations in the spring of 2015 and had a deadline of early August of the same year to respond. But that response never came. Instead, in April of 2016, the NCAA sent out an amended Notice of Allegations, and that new NoA was noticeably missing a number of things: Any mention of Roy Williams, any mention of the men’s basketball team and any mention of impermissible benefits; initially, the NCAA had ruled that academic advisors directing student-athletes into the bogus classes constituted an impermissible benefit. Knowledge of the fake classes was not known to the student body at-large, the thinking went, so enrollment in those classes was a benefit that was available to a normal UNC student.
You can make a fairly cogent argument that, by definition, that’s an impermissible benefit being provided by the athletic department.
https://audioboom.com/boos/4894749-recruiting-rules-unc-and-the-ncaa-aau-packet-problems
Except, according to North Carolina’s response, the NCAA had already made a ruling on this.
(Again, props to Andrew Carter for picking up on something a lot of us missed.)
From the response the NCAA sent in to the NCAA on Monday and made public on Tuesday:
The report that the Director of the AMA is referencing is the Martin Report, which was such a train wreck that UNC had to commission the Wainstein Report, which is what provided the most damning evidence of UNC athletics targeting the fraudulent classes to keep kids eligible. What matters there, however, is that the AMA determined this “did not violate NCAA rules”.
The footnote to that blurb is even more interesting:
One of the major talking points after the release of UNC’s response was ‘Why?’ Why is North Carolina trying to play hardball with the NCAA? Why aren’t they self-imposing menial sanctions to try and appease ‘Mark Emmert and The Overlords’? Why is the tone of this response somewhere between “stick to sports” and “come at me, bro”?
That footnote may be the ‘Why’.
Because, the way this reads, UNC is essentially saying that the NCAA had determined in 2013 that no NCAA rules were broken then tried to hide that fact from the university, which is against their own bylaws.
That’s not a good look.