NCAA's Three-Year Investigation Into Fake Classes At UNC Ends With A Whimper

By Nick Martin

After three-and-a-half years of investigating fake classes in North Carolina’s African and Afro-American Studies department that dated back over 18 years, the NCAA announced on Friday that it does not have the jurisdiction to charge the university with violations of either academic fraud or providing “impermissible benefits” to its athletes.

 

Of course, the NCAA’s findings, which can be read in full below, are strewn with catty, defensive remarks—“From its inception, the infractions case has been public in nature, including attacks on the membership’s infractions process and individual members of the panel”—and backhanded compliments to UNC’s legal team for figuring out a way to somehow make the NCAA’s investigative branch look exactly like the incompetent, over-reaching body that it is. The only violations the NCAA could bring focused on a pair of individuals, department chair Julius Nyang’oro and administrator Deborah Crowder, who refused multiple times to cooperate with the investigation. The two former UNC employees were determined to have violated the NCAA’s rule against “unethical conduct and failing to cooperate during an investigation,” resulting in Nyang’oro being hit with a five-year show cause order.

The NCAA’s Committee on Infractions, whose roster doesn’t contain a single ACC representative, split from the Enforcement Staff’s decision, ruling that North Carolina’s legal team was correct in its assertions that the courses were not designed solely for athletes and that academic fraud did not take place despite the regular occurrence of “paper classes”—per NCAA rules, only member schools, not the NCAA, are able to officially say academic fraud occurred.

(In case you’re hung up on that last bit, what it means, essentially, is that all UNC’s lawyers had to do was consistently say, “We reviewed the classes and no, we did not find academic fraud” and the NCAA’s entire case crumbled; naturally, UNC’s lawyers did just that. It was really that simple.)

UNC’s counter to the NCAA building its entire case on impermissible benefits for athletes was that because the classes were open to the entire student body, athletes, though they made up 47 percent of the total enrollment in these classes, were not granted a benefit—an easy “A” class—that was not also available to the general student population.

By leaving the ability to determine what academic fraud is to the member schools, the NCAA created an easy pathway to success for UNC. The university served its year of probation handed down by its accreditor, Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (after openly admitting to lying to SACSabout the courses multiple times); despite initially agreeing with it, the university later denied crucial findings from the Wainstein report that claimed academic fraud occurred; and it countered the academic fraud claims by asserting that while the classes did not meet the school’s rigorous standards, the little work that was required was completed and turned in, thus constituting a class. That’s it. The NCAA bylaws—bylaws cleverly written by the member schools—were all it took to nuke the NCAA’s entire investigation.

The NCAA’s case began way back in June 2014, with the first notice of allegations being released in May 2015; the second one came in April 2016, to which UNC responded that the NCAA was overstepping its bounds; the third and final NOA was issued last December. Ultimately, none of them mattered, because they never really mattered to the right people (SACS) to begin with. The NCAA, despite its loud chest-beating and insistence on adding a ram pelt next to its trojan trophy and mustang carcass, was attempting once again to lie to itself and its member schools and prosecute a university and its athletic department that, put simply, did what was best for its athletes and any struggling students. The fight against the NCAA ran up a legal bill north of $18 million for UNC. Considering a good number of folks outside and inside the program reportedly expected a “hammer to fall,” per the N&O’s Andrew Carter, I reckon a great many Tar Heels would admit that’s money well spent as soon they all wake up hungover as hell tomorrow morning.

Later tonight, UNC will host Late Night with Roy, its annual basketball pep rally, where this year, the Tar Heels will hoist the banner from its 2017 championship. I imagine, or at least hope, there will be chants of “Fuck the NCAA” as the banner, the third one UNC has won since 2005, reaches the ceiling (also known as the roof) of the Dean Dome. 

Bullpen steps up to provide Yankees with old October magic

By Mike Lupica
NY Daily News October 4, 2017
This was before the biggest night they have had at Yankee Stadium in a long time had officially begun, with the crowd coming hard and late at the Stadium along 161st St. It was maybe 20 minutes before the first pitch, and four hours before the Yankees would be back on the board in October, when somebody near Babe Ruth Plaza yelled out, “Is it Game 1 or Game 7?” And because it was a wild-card game, it felt like both.
Most of the best Yankee memories, of course, are still from across 161st St. from the new place, where the old Yankees made memories and made more history at this time of the year in baseball than any team ever has or ever will. But on this night, the 2017 Yankees made their own history.
Because across all the years for the Yankees, on either side of 161st St., the Yankees had never won a postseason game when their starting pitcher was only able to get them one out. They had done everything else in October. They had never done that. Until they did it against the Twins on Tuesday night, in a game they finally ended up winning 8-4, and winning themselves a trip to Cleveland in the process.
Luis Severino, who had pitched like such a star for the Yankees this season, lasted just one-third of an inning on Tuesday night. He lasted about 20 minutes. By the time he left, after 29 pitches, the Twins had gotten him for two home runs and there were two more runners on, at second and third. The score was 3-0, Twins. The way Severino had pitched reminded you of the time, in a Game 5 at home against the Tigers in 2011. Ivan Nova was the hot kid of that season for the Yankees. He got the ball that night with a season on the line. Gave up two home runs in the first inning. Yankees went home.
Now they were down three runs to the Twins, and Severino was gone, and here came Chad Green and his big arm out of the bullpen. This was before David Robertson would show up in the third, asked to pick up Green with the bases loaded the way Green had picked up Severino. This was a moment when the Yankees’ season was very much on the line, much too early in the Wild Card game. Maybe the Yankees would still have scored eight runs, even if they had fallen behind by five. No one knew it in the top of the first and top of October at Yankee Stadium.
So here is what Chad Green, in the biggest moment of his baseball career, did. He struck out Byron Buxton. Then he struck out the Twins’ catcher, Jason Castro. A few minutes later Didi Gregorius, one of the best trades Brian Cashman has ever made, hit a 3-run home run to tie the game. The Twins would get one more run, in the third, when Buxton got down the line fast enough to keep himself out of a double play and get the Twins the only run they would get off the Yankees’ bullpen on this night. But somehow you knew, by the time the first inning was over, that the Yankees would beat the Twins, just because they always do in October.
Robertson would go 3.1 innings on this night, and strike out five, pitch from the third and into the sixth the way Mo Rivera once pitched the late innings on occasions like this. Tommy Kahnle would come on after Robertson, and finally Aroldis Chapman in the ninth. Over the last 8.2 innings of this game, the one when so much excitement and so much promise for this Yankee team could have gone to waste, Green and Robertson and Kahnle and Chapman made their own history on the north side of 161st.
It all started with Green, who not only struck out the last two guys of the top of the first but the first two guys in the top of the second. It really did feel like the earliest in a postseason ballgame a save had ever been recorded for the New York Yankees.
I asked Jeff Nelson, once a great Yankee reliever himself, on championship Yankee teams, what it was like to come in the way Green did and know he had to get a strikeout.
“Sometimes you try to hard and end up getting yourself into a bad count,” Nelson said. “And sometimes you get strikeouts like he got tonight."
He got his strikeouts and Robertson got his and the Yankees backed all this with three home runs: From Gregorius, from Brett Gardner, and from Aaron Judge, who hit one out to left that seemed to get there faster than a text message. All season long, we had seen the kind of stick the Yankees have. We had seen a good bullpen get better at the trade deadline because Cashman got Robertson and Kahnle from the White Sox. Now they had played their way to Cleveland with home runs, and with that bullpen.
The Yankees hadn’t won a playoff game in five years. Hadn’t ever won a postseason game in which their starter only lasted a third of an inning. They won Tuesday night, after it looked like they might lose early. They go to Cleveland. Back on the board in October.