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Sullivan | UNC scandal '10 times worse' than U of L strippers

Tim Sullivan

@TimSullivan714

North Carolina Coach Roy Williams answers questions during a press conference on Saturday in Memphis.
March 25, 2017

David Ridpath says North Carolina deserves the NCAA’s “death penalty” and that he will eat his hat if it happens.

The president of the Drake Group, an organization dedicated to academic integrity in college athletics, views the many educational corners cut in Chapel Hill as “10 times worse” than the stripper scandal at the University of Louisville.

Yet despite recent remarks by University of Maryland President Wallace Loh and the difficulties of digesting a size 7 3/8 hat, Ridpath remains skeptical the Committee on Infractions will use its nuclear option on the Tar Heels.

Loh raised that possibility during a Maryland faculty senate meeting last Thursday, and his comments reverberated on Tobacco Road as if a meteor had made a direct hit on Roy Williams’ head.

“As president, I sit over a number of dormant volcanoes,” Loh said. “One of them is an athletic scandal. It blows up, it blows up the university, its reputation. It blows up the president.

“For the things that happened in North Carolina, it’s abysmal. I would think that this would lead to the implementation of the death penalty by the NCAA. But I’m not in charge of that.”

Given the agonizing length of the NCAA’s investigation into 18 years of systemic academic fraud, and the extension afforded UNC to respond to a second amended NCAA notice of allegations, it may be several more months before this interminable case reaches a resolution. But Ridpath, whose resume includes stints as a compliance officer at Marshall and Weber State, suspects the NCAA has no more appetite to hammer UNC than he does to feed on a fedora.

“I don’t want to say (Loh’s) statement is misinformed,” Ridpath said. “But I think he’s jumping the gun and doesn’t understand the system that well. ... If there ever was a death penalty case in recent memory, this is one. But when you look at how much the NCAA has tried to run away from this, I would bet a ton of money on it never being enacted again for a Power Five school.’’

In the 30 years since SMU’s football program was shut down for a full year because of repeated violations, no other Division I school has faced the NCAA’s most extreme punishment. As a self-policing institution with a vested interest in the financial health of its member schools, the Committee on Infractions tends to pull punches a more dispassionate judge might deliver.

Still, Loh’s statement speaks to the significance of the North Carolina case as a measure of the NCAA’s collective will. If the organization that governs college athletics in this country fails to impose strong sanctions on a school that kept athletes eligible for nearly two decades through bogus classes, it might as well abandon any pretense of oversight.

“As sordid and as scummy as the Louisville allegations are, it doesn’t even come close (to North Carolina),” Ridpath said. “This is the absolute worst thing that can be done: academic misconduct, lack of academic integrity or academic manipulation. It goes to the very core of what the NCAA stands for. ...

"If the NCAA does nothing, they really need to pack up and not do enforcement anymore. ... My hope is the penalties will be pretty severe. If they would take away the championship banners (from 2005 and 2009), that would send a message.”

North Carolina’s pugnacious position has been that the NCAA lacks jurisdiction; that the university's fraudulent courses were available to all students and not athletes alone; and that Maryland’s Loh was out of line by speaking “with no direct knowledge of our case ... to offer such uninformed and highly speculative opinions.” Before his team cut down the nets at the Final Four, Williams insisted that his basketball program had done "nothing wrong," as if the players who had graduated with tainted degrees were rogue operatives and not his responsibility.

To call Carolina’s arguments claptrap would be too kind. The fake courses were disproportionately populated by athletes, steered to them by advisors more interested in preserving eligibility than education. That the fraud persisted for nearly two decades is, at best, proof of institutional indifference to a broad conspiracy contravening the core mission of higher education.

If this does not lead to the NCAA's death penalty, nothing should.

Tim Sullivan can be reached at (502) 582-4650, tsullivan@courier-journal.com or @TimSullivan714 on Twitter.