LOUISVILLE – North Carolina deserved its victory over Kentucky yesterday in a riveting college basketball game that went right to the end before being decided. The Tar Heels of Coach Roy Williams now will move on to next week’s NCAA Final Four in Phoenix, where they’ll be favored to win its sixth national title since the NCAA began sponsoring the tournament in 1939.
But I have a question: Should the Tar Heels even be in this tournament? The longest-running investigation in NCAA history (it seems that way, at least) still is percolating in Chapel Hill. From what we know, it’s perhaps the most outrageous case of academic fraud in NCAA history.
Roy Williams: NCAA investigation still percolating.
Over a period of almost 15 years, dating back to the end of basketball coach Dean Smith’s historic career, a lot of North Carolina students, including several men’s basketball and football players, took a phony class in African-American studies. They didn’t have to do anything, in other words, and yet got credit for academic work.
Had this happened at, oh, East Tennessee State, the case would have been over and done a couple of years ago. But apparently because it’s North Carolina, a longtime NCAA poster child for the melding to quality academics and quality athletics, the thing has drug on longer than the Watergate investigation (it seems that way, at least).
And so the NCAA now finds itself in the awkward position of perhaps having to award the men’s basketball championship trophy to a university under investigation and perhaps eligible to get even the death penalty somewhere down the road. This is what you get when the wheels of justice turn as slowly as they do in the NCAA.
And what about Baylor?
Once recognized as the world’s largest Baptist university, Baylor has been the scene of a one of the nastiest sexual abuse scandals in NCAA history. Although the allegations occurred in the football program, the NCAA could make a statement by barring all of Baylor’s teams from intercollegiate competition for a season. That’s how unacceptable and disgusting the situation is.
I have no idea what’s going on with the NCAA enforcement staff except that it’s overworked because of the cheating epidemic that has infected big-time college sports. Relatively speaking, it deal with the U of L basketball sex scandal is a fairly forthright and timely manner.
I look for Coach Rick Pitino to get suspended for eight to 10 games at the beginning of next season, and that will be the end of it unless Andre McGee, the former director of basketball operations who was at the heart of the mess, either decides to coming out of hiding or is forced to testify in court.
Of all the transgressions in the NCAA rulebook, academic fraud may be the most serious because it goes directly to the heart of what intercollegiate athletics is supposed to be. When universities cheat to get athletes and/or keep them eligible, as Memphis did by having someone take Derrick Rose’s eligibility exams for him, it’s an affront to universities everywhere.
I realize, of course, that none of the current North Carolina players took the bogus class that got Carolina in such deep trouble. But the scandal happened on Williams’ watch. While it doesn’t seem right for innocent players to pay for the sins of others, there must be some accountability — and, the Tar Heels’ presence in the NCAA field is a slap in the face to all the participants who abide by the rules.
Unless the public and media have been misinformed, Carolina will have to pay at some point down the road. The penalties could involve everything from forfeitures to fines to suspensions. The death penalty is not out of the question. At some point, the NCAA has to say “enough,” and what better example than the formerly clean Carolina program?
If it was possible to put all this out of mind yesterday and concentrate on the game, as I’m sure most hardcore hoops fans were able to do, it lived up to its hype, at least from an intensity standpoint.
Had UK been able to pull it out, the unlikely heroes would have been senior Dominque Hawkins, who scored 10 points to keep the Cats close in the first half, and 6-ll Isaac Humphries, who shocked everybody, probably even himself, with a second-half performance that almost negated Carolina’s huge edge in size (the Heels out-rebounded UK 44-34).
Humphries had 12 points, five rebounds, an assist and a steal, but was on the bench when Carolina went on a 12-0 run late in the game to turn a 64-59 deficit into a 70-64 lead.
Kentucky coach John Calipari has never been investigated at UK by the NCAA (Keith Taylor Photo)
Leading by three, the Tar Heels missed the front end of a one-and-one with seconds to play, and UK freshman Malik Monk swished a three to tie it at 73. On the next possession, Carolina’s Luke Maye hit a two-pointer jumper that dropped through with 0:03 to play.
As always is the case in the Calipari era, UK fans won’t dwell on the loss too long. They figured to lose six players – two by graduation (Hawkins and Derek Willis), three by one-and-done (Monk, De’Aaron Fox, and Edrice “Bam” Abedeyo), and one by two-and-done (Isiah Briscoe).
But Calipari has a new platoon of high school stars ready to move up and keep the Big Blue wheel spinning.
One thing about Calipari, by the way. Like him or not, he has not been investigated by the NCAA during his eight years on the Wildcat bench. I hope UK fans will point to that with pride.
Billy Reed is a member of the U.S. Basketball Writers Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame and the Transylvania University Hall of Fame. He has been named Kentucky Sports Writer of the Year eight times and has won the Eclipse Award twice. Reed has written about a multitude of sports events for over four decades, but he is perhaps one of media’s most knowledgeable writers on the Kentucky Derby
