Dear Coach,
Just read your column on Carolina and the Wainstein report. Couldn't agree more with your comments about Dean and Carolina basketball program. I attended Chapel Hill with guys like Michael Jordan — Even in the down years just after Dean left, it has always been a classy program which I was proud of.
To your point, there's no doubt that the challenges of big-money sports has been a challenge at most large schools. What has disappointed me greatly is the lack of accountability the University shoulders in the Wainstein report. Rather than tackling the real issues head-on, they saw fit to attribute blame to a retired administrative assistant and an anonymous system of controls. Really?
I have no doubt that Carolina is taking steps to prevent a recurrence of the scam classes. I am less certain they will tackle the larger issues surrounding money sports. The nation's first public university, Carolina's stated mission is to educate the next generation of leaders. Their addiction to sports dollars as a means to that end is incredibly sad. This episode was an opportunity to show courage, integrity, and leadership—Instead Carolina burned in effigy an administrative assistant and asked us to feel better.
Bruce Twery, Pikesville
Dear Coach,
Contrary to your assertion that it is a "pseudo-story," the idea that a major public university would be implicated in long continuing academic improprieties which were designed expressly to keep athletes from several sports academically eligible for participation is, and should be, openly investigated and reported on.
The defense of your Alma Mater in the matter of the academic fraud perpetuated for approximately 18 years is, to me, completely understandable. However, I do take umbrage at your snide remark about the "newly re-found sense of self-righteousness" of the fans of our state's flagship university. Historically, your fine institution, along with Duke and UVa., have openly derided the University of Maryland as an inferior academic institution all the while ignoring the fact that the requirements for acceptance and continuing enrollment there are equal to, and in the case of certain majors, more stringent than at those schools.
To be sure there are, at a large number of schools, areas of study that some athletes are directed to in order to remain eligible for competition because they require less rigorous course work designed for those with , shall we say, a less than stellar academic background in high school. With that said, I will bet that there are darn few, if any, other universities that have courses where there are no requirements for class attendance, note taking, or tests and which the only requirement is a "research" paper where if you spelled your name correctly you got an "A." To allow such academic fraud for so long is a darn shame and does rightly tarnish the image of North Carolina. It is naive to think that during all those years no one in the athletic department, from the AD, to the various coaching staffs, and academic advisors knew that this was going on.
Coach Smith, who IS among the all time greats of basketball coaches and is from all accounts a fine man in all ways, may not have been aware of this fraud, and I'm one to believe that he wasn't, but someone or a group of someones were aware and let it go because it was expedient for the teams to do so.
I don't mean to deride your opinion, just bring a bit of a different point of view as a counter balance. Just as an aside, in the early 60's, probably before you were born, a highly touted quarterback from western PA was recruited to play for the Terps. Unfortunately he couldn't qualify academically to enroll and to keep him from signing with any of the other ACC schools, where he could qualify, coach Tom Nugent called an old friend and put him in touch with the player who eventually signed with that coach's school. Give up? The coach was Bear Bryant, the player, Joe Namath.
Bill Kennedy, Taneytown (Maryland '69)
Bruce and Bill, thank you both for your notes.
The unedited version of last week's column contained an elongated excerpt from a recent Grantland column by Charles P. Pierce on the same topic. Pierce's column was less a defense of UNC, and more of an indictment of the NCAA, and the fallacy and fallibility of the system as a whole. I'd hoped to incorporate Pierce's words to give context to the idea that, as Pierce said it (better), "there are no new problems in college sports. There is only new mock outrage."
Pierce described the NCAA as 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 it is one of the functions of our institutions of higher education to be part of the multimillion-dollar sports-entertainment industry."
Pierce points out that grade inflation is and has become increasingly prevalent, particularly among the Ivies (Harvard, Yale, et al.), which "have allowed such grade inflation to occur so as to maintain their place as America's most prestigious universities." Carolina, Pierce continues, allowed grade inflation to maintain a "flood of athletic revenue."
Grade inflation happens everywhere. Even among privileged smart kids; and for the same reason — Money. But, as sports do with every other aspect of society — both the good and the bad — (here, in the case of Carolina) they provided a platform for the personification of an institutional problem. The institution with the problem isn't UNC, it's the NCAA.
Pierce closes by saying that "it is no proper part of a university's mission to provide quality television programming… That this has become the norm in America's system of higher education is a monstrous accident of history and of academic neglect… There's a kind of blessed relief 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."
For better or worse, the system — as one designed for the primary purpose of educating students, and predicated upon supporting sports as a way to round-out the student experience and make a bit more well-rounded the student and the campus community as a whole — is only going to get worse. With the autonomy recently granted to the "power five" conferences, and players likely earning the right to get paid in some degree or another, the fictitious ideal of a student-athlete will become an even more antiquated fable, while the business of sports on college campuses will continue to become more of exactly that — a business. To reiterate a point perhaps lost in the UNC — UMD (playful) banter, the analogy of (Johnny Manziel and) online classes to the "paper class scandal" is fair, real, and is sadly trending.
(Bill, ironically enough, yours and Bruce's notes sidetracked me from a column/commentary on Maryland's football team's captains' classless refusal to shake hands against Penn State. D'oh Terps!)
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Matt Laczkowski is a former college basketball player and a former coach who writes a Monday column. Reach him at 410-857-7896 or coach@with-character.com.
