OT: UNC Scandal. . . Men's BB vs. Women's BB in Spotlight

[RUinPinehurst]

The Raleigh N&O today published an article that again challenges UNC in how very differently the school deals with its Men's BB program and coach, compared to its Women's BB program and coach.

Well folks, one program brings in mega $ each year, while the other loses $ annually. Care to guess which is which?

This article comes in the wake of UNC self-reported violations involving Women's BB and Men's Soccer. Critics have labeled this move as a "Four Corners" tactic by UNC, allowing it to add a few more months to its deadline of responding to the NCAA's Notice of Allegations. This would allow the school to get in another full BB season and an NCAA tourney run, before it has to pay for its two-decades-plus of cheating.

Anyway, the article is posted below and can also be read online at: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/unc-scandal/article31148684.html


UNC’s contrasting treatment of Williams, Hatchell draws attention

by Dan Kane and Andrew Carter

UNC-Chapel Hill has two Hall of Fame basketball coaches who each have at least one national championship on their resumes: Sylvia Hatchell and Roy Williams.

Hatchell is the second winningest women’s coach in NCAA history; Williams was the fastest men’s coachto 700 wins. Both have been coaching for more than 25 years and have nearly always taken their teams to the NCAA tournament.

But as the NCAA case involving serious allegations against both programs grinds toward likely sanctions, Williams, 65, has won a lucrative contract extension; Hatchell, 63, is without one.

UNC officials aren’t explaining why two top-flight coaches would be treated differently. As a result, the university has attracted questions about whether it is sacrificing Hatchell and her program to spare the men’s basketball program from harsh NCAA sanctions. Neither coach has been accused of doing anything wrong.

Since the NCAA hit UNC with allegations of five major infractions, including a lack of institutional control, Hatchell has seen her team take a heavy blow. Three recruits from a stellar 2013 recruiting season have left for other schools. One transferred days before the allegations arrived at UNC; the other two in the following weeks. A fourth left a year ago, after a season in which Hatchell stepped away to undergo chemotherapy to combat leukemia. Hatchell so far has held onto this season’s recruiting class, which includes two high school All-Americans.

On Friday, UNC Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham said more evidence emerged that a few more former women basketball players had received improper academic help. He said that information had been shared with the NCAA. This development is likely to push back a hearing on the NCAA’s allegations at least by two months.

On the men’s side, Williams continues to field an experienced team already touted as a favorite for the 2016 national championship. Only one player left – for the NBA, and not out of fear of a tournament ban. Top high school prospects, however, have shown concern about possible sanctions and have chosen other schools, including archrival Duke.

Cunningham’s announcement makes it more likely that the men’s team will finish the upcoming season before the NCAA decides penalties.

Football recruits have said coach Larry Fedora told them the NCAA won’t hurt his program, based on the advice of UNC’s lawyers. Fedora has not discussed specifics, but said he felt “confident things were going to turn out good.”

Last month, Meghan Austin, a former player of Hatchell’s and now a coach herself, drew national attention to the differing perceptions of the men’s and women’s programs in a column published in The News & Observer. She claimed that UNC is sacrificing Hatchell and her program to the NCAA to spare men’s basketball and football.

“With the NCAA allegations, I am trying to wrap my head around how the women’s basketball team has been made the scapegoat in all of this,” wrote Austin, the women’s basketball coach at Montreat College near Asheville. “Our program was not the only team in the report, yet we are the ones being talked about the most. Roy Williams and his program were in the report, and he got a contract extension. The football program was in the report, and its coaching staff was confident enough to tell recruits that they will not receive any repercussions from the NCAA investigation.”

Among those who tweeted the link to Austin’s column: Chamique Holdsclaw, a former University of Tennessee and WNBA star; and Nicole LaVoi, a University of Minnesota professor and advocate for women’s sports.

“The war on Women Coaches is real,” LaVoi tweeted. She later said in an email she knew little about the case.

In an interview last month, Cunningham declined to discuss the details of Hatchell’s contract situation. He typically does not comment on personnel matters. Her contract ends in 2018; Williams’ extension keeps him at UNC until 2020.

“I have immense respect for Coach Hatchell and her career and the success that she’s had,” Cunningham said. “I’m delighted that she’s contracted through 2018. And as we do with all of our teams, I’ll review her situation, her team’s situation, at the end of (next) season.”

On Friday, he said he continued to have confidence in the program’s coaching staff.

Bringing the money
Men’s basketball and football are the money-making sports at UNC and other top Division I schools. Men’s basketball feeds the coffers of the NCAA. The organization collected nearly a billion dollars in revenue last year, USA Today reported, nearly all of it from the “March Madness” tournament. The majority of the money goes back to the member schools.

Women’s sports typically lose money, but universities are required under the federal anti-discrimination Title IX law to carry them if they want to have men’s programs.

UNC’s football and men’s basketball teams were the two highest in terms of enrollments in the fake classes within the African studies department, according to the most in-depth investigation into the scandal, which was led by former federal prosecutor Kenneth Wainstein. Over an 18-year period, more than 3,100 students enrolled in the fake classes; roughly half of them were athletes.

There were two types of bogus classes: lecture classes that never met, and independent studies that had no instruction. Football players accounted for 963 enrollments in the classes that were listed as lectures, which began in 1999, while men’s basketball accounted for 226. Football teams include roughly seven times as many athletes as basketball.

Men’s basketball had nearly double the 114 enrollments of the women’s basketball team.

The disparity is even greater in the independent studies, which began in 1993. Men’s basketball players were in these classes from the beginning, while the women don’t show up in significant numbers until 1998. By 1999, when the fake lecture classes were added to the scam, the men’s team had 57independent studies enrollments, compared with 15 enrollments for the women. (Wainstein said at least half of all the independent studies offered had no instruction.)

The Boxill factor
The ‘scapegoat’ speculation comes at a time when UNC is drafting its response to the NCAA’s enforcement division. UNC could seek to pursue an agreementwith the NCAA’s enforcement division on sanctions and penalties. Known as a summary disposition, it’s a way to avoid a lengthy hearing before the Committee on Infractions, a panel of athletic and academic officials who mete out punishment.

It’s up to the committee to accept such summary dispositions; it can reject them entirely and proceed to a hearing, or simply hit the universities with tougher penalties. Stuart Brown, an attorney who represents universities in infractions cases, said it’s unlikely the committee would accept a summary disposition, given the severity of the case and the widespread public interest in the outcome.

Neither the NCAA nor UNC is talking about the specifics of the case.

Some UNC athletics advocates say women’s basketball faces the biggest hit. Its former longtime academic counselor, Jan Boxill, was directly involved in the long-running academic fraud.

One of the NCAA’s allegations specifically cites her efforts to keep women’s basketball players academically eligible.

Wainstein found that the fraud began in 1993 when Deborah Crowder, then an administrative manager for the African studies department, started creating classes that had no instruction and only required a paper that she would then give a high grade. She was not a faculty member. She launched the fake classes after academic counselors for the athletes complained to her about independent studies that were too rigorous, Wainstein reported.

The counselors were not identified, but Crowder was close friends with Burgess McSwain, the men’s basketball academic counselor. Crowder was also a huge fan of men’s basketball and was sometimes so distraught about a loss that she would miss work the next day. McSwain died in 2004.

Multiple sports
Boxill’s involvement in the scandal is deep. Her email correspondence shows she arranged for women’s basketball players to be enrolled in the classes, suggested grades in one instance and in five instances wrote parts of athletes’ papers. She was also a philosophy instructor and provided suspect grades for athletes with some of her classes, the investigation found.

Boxill, former director of the Parr Center for Ethics, was elected faculty leader in 2011, shortly before the fake classes were discovered.

One UNC supporter, Art Chansky, who has written several books about the Tar Heel basketball team’s success on the court, wrote last month that Hatchell should “go gracefully” after the upcoming season, and that her program would take the hardest hit from the NCAA.

That drew criticism from Mary Willingham, the learning specialist for athletes who blew the whistle on the fake classes, and UNC history professor Jay Smith. In their book “Cheated,” they wrote that enrollment records show the cheating began to accommodate men’s basketball, and continued when Williams became coach.

Boxill’s efforts to assist women’s basketball players by writing parts of papers and seeking a grade boost is a specific extra benefits allegation within the NCAA’s report. But more than 20 exhibits cited in another allegation – that athletes in several sports received impermissible benefits in the form of special arrangements to enter the classes – cite Boxill as well.

Three of the exhibits appear to be an email discussion between Boxill, Wayne Walden, the men’s basketball counselor who succeeded McSwain, and Janet Huffstetler, a tutor for the men’s basketball team, over grading in one of Boxill’s philosophy courses.

“I have re-examined the quizzes and have changed the grades – only slightly in two cases,” Boxill wrote in one of the emails, dated July 11, 2005.

That has nothing to do with athletes being given “special arrangements” to Crowder’s fake classes, which is the thrust of that allegation, but it is included there, instead of with the allegation citing Boxill’s misconduct.

Trusted Boxill
All three sports are identified in two major allegations: a lack of institutional control and the acceptance of impermissible benefits.

Football might face a less harsh sanction because the NCAA has already penalized the program in a previous investigation that determined agents and their runners had handed out cash and other perks to players, and that a tutor had provided impermissible help on some athletes’ papers.

The NCAA vacated 16 wins going back to 2008, fined UNC and banned the university from postseason play for the 2012 season. Coach Butch Davis was fired, even though UNC could not pin any impropriety on him, and the athletic director, Dick Baddour, retired early.

Hatchell became the women’s coach in 1986. She told investigators she knew her players were taking a lot of classes within the African studies department, but she thought they were in classes that actually met. She also said she thought Crowder, the administrative manager who offered the fake classes, wasa faculty member.

Hatchell said she had great trust in Boxill, a former women’s basketball coach for the University of Tampa who provided color commentary for radio broadcasts of the UNC women’s basketball games.

Williams was an assistant coach at UNC under Dean Smith, then left in 1988 to coach at Kansas. He returned to UNC in 2003 and brought academic counselor Walden with him.

Unlike Hatchell, Williams told Wainstein he saw some things he didn’t like. He noticed that his team had many African studies majors, and they were taking a lot of independent studies. He said he knew one, Rashad McCants, took “three or four” independent studies in the spring 2005 semester, when the team won a national championship.

McCants told ESPN he had failed algebra and psychology courses in the Fall 2004 semester, jeopardizing his eligibility. He took nothing but fake classes the following semester, his transcript showed, and made the dean’s list. Several of his teammates had also enrolled in fake classes that semester, Wainstein reported.

In a recent interview for ESPN and Yahoo Sports, Williams spoke of being credited for moving his players away from the classes. Williams did not bring his concerns to the NCAA, UNC academic officials or the athletic department’s compliance staff.

Williams didn’t speak publicly of his concerns until Wainstein’s report was released in October, three years after the scandal surfaced.

‘No support’
In an interview last month, Austin said she came up with the column earlier this summer while working at Hatchell’s basketball camp. Austin said she and other former players discussed how to show support for Hatchell and her program.

“Some of us former players, we kind of sat down this summer and we were talking about how it didn’t sit right with us that it seems like there’s so many teams that were involved in the (bogus class) situation but women’s basketball was the one that people were pinpointing,” Austin said.

Austin said she hoped that other former players, whom she declined to name, would be willing to speak out and share their frustration – and their support for Hatchell. Austin said she would encourage them to contact The N&O. None have.

Nonetheless, Austin said the most meaningful support for Hatchell would come from the UNC administration.

“There’s no support for Coach Hatchell at all,” Austin said. “And a lot of us have worked in college athletics before, and we know how important it is to have the support of your bosses.” Austin could not be reached Friday for comment after Cunningham’s press conference.

Cunningham said last month he disagreed with the characterization that Hatchell hasn’t received support. He noted that Hatchell is under contract for three more seasons and that “she’s had a great career (and) a lot of success.”

“And I’d expect that success into the future,” he said.

Hatchell declined to comment for this story. She has retained a prominent lawyer, Wade Smith of Raleigh, who also declined comment.

Dan Kane: 919-829-4861, @dankanenando

 

[rubaseball78]

Certainly ironic a director of ethics is in the middle of this.

 

[Abro1975]

What's the commissioner of the ACC have to say? Oh that's right, he was the UNC AD when it all started. Remember when the ACC & NCAA came down hard on Valvano & NC St. and Clemson too ? Now? Not so much.

 

[superfan01]

Wouldn't take much what the Raleigh newspapers or Durham papers have to say. Clearly they have an agenda to put unc men's bball down.
This article is pure slant from nc state country. Yawn.

 

[KingHigh]

Former student athletes from UNC have come out and blasted these reports as "ungood" and "distrue".

 

[_dave_]

Wouldn't take much what the Raleigh newspapers or Durham papers have to say. Clearly they have an agenda to put unc men's bball down.
This article is pure slant from nc state country. Yawn.

Yes because everyone knows that Chapel Hill is sooo far away from Raleigh and Durham.

 

[keithygolfer]

Dan Kane is a HACK, like he has no motivation here???

 

[CUTiger1977]

Goodest post.

Former student athletes from UNC have come out and blasted these reports as "ungood" and "distrue".

 

[Knight_Light]

Wouldn't take much what the Raleigh newspapers or Durham papers have to say.

You obviously forgot (or don't know) that all of the UNC Scandal crap over the past few years has basically been uncovered by work of a few reporters from the Raleigh Observer. If not for their investigative work, the 2-3 decades of academic fraud at UNC would still be a secret.

 

[RUinPinehurst]

You obviously forgot (or don't know) that all of the UNC Scandal crap over the past few years has basically been uncovered by work of a few reporters from the Raleigh Observer. If not for their investigative work, the 2-3 decades of academic fraud at UNC would still be a secret.

The N&O's investigation into UNC's athletic-driven academic scandal was sparked by a solid lead/tip, provided by a rival team: NC State. Julius Pepper's transcript was posted on a UNC public server/site, and a member of "PackPride" retrieved it and shared it with Dan Kane, an investigative reporter with the N&O.

Peppers was a "student-athlete" at UNC from 1998-2001 and played BB for Bill Guthridge and Matt Doherty, and FB for Mack Brown. He was the second overall pick in the 2002 NFL draft.

Since that transcript "revelation," of course, we've learned that the scandal originated in MBB in 1989 with Dean Smith, whose teams featured 23 of the first 25 "student-athletes" involved in these "irregular" course.

FB and WBB got "in" on the scheme shortly thereafter, as a way of keeping players academically eligible, via "no show" "paper classes," as well as by another scheme whereby students took an "incomplete" and then benefited by an unauthorized grade change, via a "dirty" administrator who forged professors' signatures--some 500 instances of that were uncovered per the Martin Report and the Waintstein Report.

In any event, that Peppers transcript was telling. If not for it, UNC would likely still be cheating their way to championships and the $ that those championships bring to the university and coaches and athletic administrators.

See below for the original article by Kane or view it online at: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/unc-scandal/article15573542.html


Peppers' transcript might point to broader academic issues at UNC
An academic record bearing the name of Julius Peppers, the former UNC All-America football star and current Chicago Bear, inexplicably surfaces. The transcript could be a link to the ongoing scandal in Chapel Hill.

On the football field, Julius Peppers was one of the most dominating players to ever wear a UNC uniform, an athlete dubbed a “freak of nature” so skilled that he helped take the university’s men’s basketball team to the Final Four in 2000.

But in the classroom, Peppers was a marginal student with a grade point average so low he was continually at risk of losing the opportunity to play, according to an academic transcript bearing his name. What kept bailing him out were several classes in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies, a relatively young academic unit led by department chair Julius Nyang’oro.

A transcript bearing Peppers’ name, found over the weekend in an odd portal on a UNC website, shows a subpar academic record: a 1.82 grade point average and 11 grades of D or F. It also suggests that the academic fraud already confirmed by the university in the African studies department goes much further back than it had previously been able to confirm.

Peppers’ transcript, and a second one that practically mirrors it, show he received grades of B or better in seven classes within the department, offerings found in later years to be academically suspect. Without those grades, it’s unlikely Peppers would have kept his GPA high enough to play sports. UNC records show Nyang’oro taught or supervised at least three of those classes.

Willis Brooks, a professor emeritus of history at UNC who once sat on its faculty athletics committee, called the transcript evidence of an academic path with the sole intent of keeping an athlete eligible to compete. But he pointed the finger at those in the university who helped make it happen.

“I feel willing to criticize a university that allows a student to get away without an education, or a very narrow one,” he said. “And that’s what this one is, a very narrow education. In no sense is this a liberal arts education.”

University officials had little to say Monday about the transcript, which was first identified by rival N.C. State University fans on the PackPride bulletin board. The university said in a brief statement that the transcript appears to be genuine, and declined all requests for interviews.

“Student academic records should never be accessible to the public, and the university is investigating reports of what appears to be a former student transcript on the University’s website,” the statement said. “The university has removed that link from the website. University officials are prohibited from discussing confidential student information.”

Peppers has gone on to a sterling career as one of the NFL’s most feared pass rushers. Nyang’oro continued to run his department as a respected chairman until last year, when another football player’s academic difficulties began a flurry of revelations that continue to haunt the university.

Today, UNC is grappling with what may be the worst case of academic fraud in its history, as Nyang’oro and his former department manager have been linked to at least 54 classes and dozens of independent studies over the past four years that offered little or no instruction and were sometimes packed with athletes.

Peppers, now a defensive end for the Chicago Bears, could not be reached. His agent, Carl Carey Jr., is a former academic counselor at UNC who helped Peppers manage his schoolwork. He said Monday that Peppers did his work.

“To suggest a connection between a decade-old transcript and the current academic issues at the university is extremely irresponsible,” Carey said.

Wolfpack fans dig

Peppers arrived at UNC in the summer of 1998, just after the departure of football coach Mack Brown, who left for Texas. Brown improved the program’s performance on the field, but his tenure also saw a rise in the number of academic exceptions admitted to play football.

Peppers’ transcript is the second of a prominent UNC football player to become public in the past year. The News & Observer last year obtained a partial transcript of former defensive standout Marvin Austin. It also had signs of a plan to keep Austin eligible to play without necessarily providing him a well-rounded education.

Austin was kicked off the team for receiving improper financial benefits from agents and others, part of an NCAA investigation that started in 2010 and ended earlier this year with a one-year bowl ban for the team and the loss of 15 athletic scholarships. Austin’s transcript helped kick off a second investigation that culminated three months ago in the university’s announcement of the academic fraud in Nyang’oro’s department.

University officials said then that it was possible the fraud went back beyond 2007, where their work stopped. But in recent weeks, they declined to answer questions about two developments that suggested the fraud went several years beyond that period.

Several weeks ago, The News & Observer found a 2001 test transcript on the university’s website that bore several similarities with the current scandal. The N&O showed it to university officials while preparing a story; the university dismissed the transcript as a fake used in testing a computer program.

The officials declined to check the transcript against academic records.

After The N&O published a story Saturday and posted the test transcript on newsobserver.com, Wolfpack fans started scrutinizing the classes and the web address. Late Sunday night, they discovered a related web address that housed what is described as Peppers’ transcript. It is a near match to the test transcript.

Why both were apparently lingering on the university’s web site for more than a decade remains unclear. If they are indeed Peppers’ records, the university could find itself in trouble with federal education officials. A 37-year-old law known as the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act prohibits the unauthorized release of most student academic records, and universities can lose federal funding for blatant violations of the law.

Who’s ‘minding the store’?

But the larger question for the university is the possibility that the academic fraud had gone undetected for more than a dozen years, and may have stayed that way without public knowledge of the transcripts of Austin and Peppers.

Burley Mitchell, a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court and a member of the UNC system Board of Governors, said “the whole thing disturbs” him.

“The entire program over there has been an unguided situation,” Mitchell, a graduate of N.C. State, said Monday. “It doesn’t seem like anybody’s in charge.”

Further troubling Mitchell is that it seems that all the revelations are being uncovered and exposed by the N&O and Pack fans, not the UNC-CH administration and trustees.

“It just seems to keep coming and coming,” Mitchell said. “I wonder who is minding the store.”

The fraud is now the subject of an SBI investigation and a special review by the Board of Governors. The NCAA continues to offer no clues as to whether it will investigate. The university’s internal investigation is also continuing, and a special faculty committee, concerned that athletics have gotten out of control at the university, has called for an independent review.

Louis Bissette, chairman of the special Board of Governors panel, said Monday the panel will delve into the latest revelations and any that follow. “All I can say to you is we really mean to do this right,” he said, “and we mean to do it thoroughly and we mean to look at all relevant material.”