<p>Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here! </p>
<p>Hardly that light. This is a massive scandal that required top UNC faculty and admins to participate to work for so long… All UNC spots should be suspended for at least 2 years. No revenue form ACC.</p>
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<p>Nice job investigating, NCAA. How’d you miss this part:</p>
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<p>In other words, the academic “support” program, in reality an academic cheating program, and the football “counseling” staff, in reality the football cheating staff, knew perfectly well that they were putting football players into sham classes that didn’t meet and didn’t have any requirements except one “paper” that might as well have been toilet paper.</p>
<p>Well, I for one, am shocked. I grew up thousands of miles from North Carolina but since I was a kid I admired their display of strong ethics and character, personified by basketball Coach Dean Smith. In all the years of observing North Carolina sports, the only nitwit I’ve seen among their athletes is Lawrence Taylor. Brilliant football player but a self-absorbed nitwit in all other matters. Larry Brown is a close second in the character flaw comparison. What’s happened at Chapel Hill? Did things go wrong after Dean Smith, or have they been covering up for a long time? </p>
<p>Click on [what</a> UNC has to say about the report](<a href=“http://carolinacommitment.unc.edu/]what”>http://carolinacommitment.unc.edu/) and you discover that “mistakes were made.” The passive voice is not the way to take responsibility, UNC. Also, “academic irregularities” is a weaselly way to describe a situation where students were getting grades in courses that didn’t exist. </p>
<p>According to [the</a> report itself](<a href=“http://3qh929iorux3fdpl532k03kg.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/UNC-FINAL-REPORT.pdf]the”>http://3qh929iorux3fdpl532k03kg.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/UNC-FINAL-REPORT.pdf), the phony classes began in 1992. So yeah, this has been going on for a long time.</p>
<p>Oh, look at the other campus group besides athletes that was well represented in the phony classes: fraternity members. What a surprise.</p>
<p>I’m concerned about the role that football plays in some of the bigger schools. Athletics should be part of but not in replacement to the academic mission of the college. If there isn’t significant overlap between students who can survive on their own at the college and players who can succeed on the team, then separate the two groups and hire athletes to play professionally. There isn’t any logical reason to treat them like college students if no attempt is made to educate them.</p>
<p>They are supposed to be student/athletes. The coaches and managers of the teams would not let them cheat their way out of practices or scrimmages, so the professors and administrators should not let them cheat their way out of coursework and education. I think if the education side started holding student/athletes to the same high standard that the athletic side does, most of them could rise to the occasion and the school would be motivated in helping them out with both aspects of their college careers not just the sports side.</p>
<p>This is pretty pathetic! Not even a half-hearted effort to make it look legitimate. </p>
<p>In the report, it says that the department secretary who created the sham class program, the department head who continued it, and the academic tutors who collaborated on it felt sorry for certain student-athletes, who were in their view underprepared and unable to do real college work. Those particular “student”-athletes were, in the view of the people who evaluated their academic ability, unable to rise to a high or even a mediocre academic standard.</p>
<p>Cheating went well beyond football including many in basketball and other sports.</p>
<p>It went beyond football, but not far beyond football and basketball. Football players and Olympic athletes were the large majority of the athletes enrolled in the program. Among non-athletes, the large majority were fraternity brothers presumably looking for easy As. And then there were a few real students who unwittingly signed up because they were interested in the subject matter.</p>
<p>You know, I also feel sorry for the “student-athletes” who were part of this. I have to assume that the majority of them didn’t have the skills to go on to pro sports careers, and the years they spent at college prepared them for nothing else. </p>
<p>According to the report, one of the key participants was UNC-CH’s Director for their Center for Ethics.</p>
<p>The NCAA should come down as hard in this situation as they did against Penn State. In the case of Penn State, three administrators did an apparent cover-up of Sandusky, but the actual athletes and faculty were not to blame.</p>
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<p>I have a hard time believing that. How many non- athletes struggle in college every day without having an administrator and a department head conspire to create fake courses to boost their GPA? Is that even a thing that most college students would even consider? I wonder how many kids at UNC Chapel Hill are on academic probation in any given semester? Is anyone helping those kids out, or are they forced to come here and beg for help on those long essays about how they will improve? </p>
<p>What is the average SAT score of the UNC football team, how does it compare to the student body? What about Michigan? Berkeley? Texas? Florida?</p>
<p>These kids get all the academic help in the world, including papers written for them I’m sure. Entire classes that don’t exist are an interesting twist on this. If someone else is doing the school work anyway, why make the kids go to class?</p>
<p>I feel like this shouldn’t really be surprising to anyone… many of these kids are not there for school, but rather there for sports.</p>
<p>The link to the final report:</p>
<p><a href=“http://advancingrefor.staging.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/UNC-FINAL-REPORT.pdf”>http://advancingrefor.staging.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/UNC-FINAL-REPORT.pdf</a></p>
<p>I would recommend the executive summary. </p>
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<p>This is what I believe all the big time division 1 schools do to help their athletes through, perhaps not as blatantly, but cheating, easy classes, tutors who write the papers, etc. Saw a little of the pregame of a college game last weekend, and a player said “This is why you go to college, to play in these big games.” They are not there for an education. It’s a sham.</p>
<p>‘Scandal’, ‘mistakes’ and so on are the words commonly used in reports about this. less commonly used are the more appropriate words, ‘corruption’, ‘fraud’ and ‘dishonesty’. </p>
<p>This is horrible. Everyone connected to this should be reprimanded or fired, especially the ETHICS DIRECTOR. Unbelievable.</p>
<p>This is a refreshing change from people complaining about the Ivy Leagues admitting football players with 1900 SAT scores.</p>