Dear Coach:
This email is eventually going to wrap around to the "UNC academic scandal" as it's commonly called today, but first I'd like to share a little personal background.
Much to my friends' agitation, I've been a UNC basketball fan for the past 40 years. I caught the bug at about age 21, due almost completely to my appreciation and respect for Dean Smith. All the values of Coach Smith's public persona resonated with me: loyalty, innovation, equality, intelligence, and specific to this email, his insistence on having true student-athletes play for him.
It is my perception that over the years as the money in professional and college basketball grew, the notion of what defines a student-athlete has changed. Maybe that premise is flawed—maybe academic exceptions have always been made for more exceptional players than I realized. Anyway, I have, possibly naively, held the opinion through the course of being a UNC fan that Carolina has been one of the good guys in this area, that the Heels somehow have recruited blue-chip players and won ACC and national championships while keeping an above-average academic posture. With the release of the Wainstein report and the stats on how far back the disproportionate use of AFAM courses went, I have to admit that I'm a little shook about the possibility that my loyalties have been somewhat misplaced over the years.
I believe in one of your columns, you said that you played for Bill Guthridge but I assume a lot of the administrative controls and academic counseling processes at that point came from Coach Smith. As a person who walked on with the Tar Heels for presumably nothing more than the love of the game, I think your perspectives on the situation at Carolina would be very interesting. Thank you for your time.
Ron Burdinski, Eldersburg
Thanks for your note, and for reading, Ron.
For the first time, I should point out that I am supposed to keep these columns to 750 words or less; with the potential for overflow or a (more) long-form version to be carried over to, and published on, the paper's online pages. There's an almost absolute certainty that that will be the case with this column.
Candidly, I'd intended to stay away from this topic; if for no other reason than because the pseudo-story has given rise to a newly re-found sense of self-righteousness among those same Maryland fans who likely make up the arc of your circle of friends otherwise agitated by your UNC athletics allegiances; the sort of reborn sense of schadenfreudenly-derived self-righteous bravado that is deaf to the voice of reason.
I grew up a Carolina fan for many of the exact same reasons as you; first and foremost among them being Coach Smith and the Carolina Way of playing hard, smart and together, and with integrity and character. Do not, for a second, let current headlines cause you to doubt Coach Smith's integrity, place among the all-time great coaches and people, or your Carolina loyalties being misled or there-because, at all misplaced.
I probably grew up watching Carolina instead of Maryland because Maryland was on probation at the time after Len Bias overdosed on cocaine. Every program and school has had their issues.
With apologies to the University of Phoenix, Strayer University, et al., Johnny Manziel took all online classes during his final year "on campus" at Texas A&M. "Paper classes" have existed for as long as football players were required to wear blazers to booster dinners to allow for said boosters to put money directly in their pockets. Today, technology simply lends a sense of legitimacy to 'lax-ed educational standards (for athletes).
Yes, the putting-upon-airs (in the wake of this pseudo-scandal) of academic integrity and innocence of everyone not wearing Carolina blue is of the level of B.S. that would make even the most crooked of politicians or priests blush. The hypocrisy in the finger-pointing and feigned naivety of other schools' fan-bases only shows the sort of Mizaru-ian, Kikazaru-ian, Iwazaru-ian (the "three wise monkeys" of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil"), honor among thieves, that permeates and perpetuates the grown-old-but-not-grown-up fan-boy booster population at the heart of — and that drives — the problem in the first place.
For those of you that will scoff and persist in mocking (and in calling for the "death penalty"), and who are naïve enough to think that UNC was somehow uniquely guilty of perpetrating some sort of sports-based fraud on its student-athletes and/or the general public, I defer to Grantland's Charles Pierce who recently wrote the following, not necessarily in defense of UNC, but as an indictment of the NCAA and the fallacy and fallibility, not of UNC, but of the system as a whole:
"There are no new problems in college sports. There is only new mock outrage. The [Wainstein] report came out at a time in which the basic paradigm of college sports is under attack. The system is overdue for collapse because it is a system based fundamentally on two basic, if incredibly opulent, absurdities: the absurdity of the mad, profit-whoring way we run higher education and the absurdity of believing that it is one of the functions of our institutions of higher education to be part of the multimillion-dollar sports-entertainment industry. The first absurdity leads inevitably to the second one, and the second one leads inevitably to the NCAA, an organization born of absurdity that has managed to create new levels of absurdity every second it has been in existence…
"At the same time, there has arisen an increasing awareness of grade inflation — especially at the country's more elite colleges and universities. Grade inflation is little more than the profit motive gussied up in a gown and a mortarboard and sent off into the classroom in disguise. … In the situation at North Carolina, we see both of these related imperatives working in concert. What are elite college sports except massive fund-raising exercises? North Carolina's basketball and football teams bring a combined $50 million a year to the university. And is what happened here anything but a grotesque example of grade inflation? The Ivies have allowed grade inflation to occur so as to maintain their place as America's most prestigious universities. North Carolina allowed grade inflation to maintain that flood of athletic revenue — and, to be fair, to maintain its image as a major sports power that does things The Right Way, because there's money in that, too…
"And now it will fall to the NCAA, God help us, to parcel out blame and responsibility and punishment. At this point, of course, the NCAA is little more than a walking conflict of interest, and an absurd one, at that. The NCAA would not exist if players were not paid under the table. The NCAA would not exist if so many of its "member institutions" weren't playing ethical mublety-peg with their academic integrity to keep the players eligible and the money flowing everywhere except into the pockets of the people doing all the real work. There is absolutely no way this will end well. There is absolutely no way this will not end hilariously, however…
"The primary function of a university is not to make a buck any more than it is to help the banks gouge the student body. (Germany just did away with college tuition entirely.) Colleges have no business being vehicles for mass entertainment anymore than they have business selling widgets or maintaining a fishing fleet. It is no proper part of a university's mission to provide quality television programming and year-round gambling opportunities for the rest of the country. That this has become the norm in America's system of higher education is a monstrous accident of history and of academic neglect, but there it is, and it is not going anywhere, and the only way to do it is simply to make an honest business out of it. This is the direction toward which events seem to be pushing the industry at the moment. There's a kind of blessed relieve in that, because the screams of outrage and betrayal never quite drown out the faint echoes of the hoofbeats of horses long ago let out of the barn."
My personal perspective; what I witnessed and participated in, firsthand — nothing short of the highest of academic standards at one of the finest public universities in the country.
I did all of my own work; took a challenging curriculum; creating my own major; sometimes taking six classes a semester; and attending all of them. Some of my former teammates are some of the smartest people I've ever known; hard-working, diligent students. The coaching staff, athletic and university administration, were all among the finest people I've ever had the privilege to meet, know, and to call friends; and, none of them were guilty of perpetrating or advancing a single accusation of academic fraud.
I am proud of my degree from UNC, and to have the privilege to call myself a Tar Heel!
Matt Laczkowski is a former Division I basketball player, and a coach. His column appears every Monday. Reach him at 410-857-7896 or coach@with-character.com.
