North Carolina, Syracuse academic scandals more than just ‘stuff’ and ‘junk’

HOUSTON

Ol’ Roy wanted to talk about zone defense and fast breaks, about those basketball players who have led his North Carolina team and that of Syracuse to the Final Four, to the college game’s mecca, its zenith, its heaven each spring.

He hoped those asking questions would respect such a request and not continue peppering him and his fellow Hall of Fame peer with more questions about all that stuff.

That’s how Roy Williams put it.

Stuff.

Later, he called it junk.

Stuff and junk.

Ol’ Roy successfully cut one of the biggest academic scandals in history down to a weekend garage sale.

He’s like a modern-day George Costanza: “It’s not a lie … if you believe it.”

Williams wanted nobody to care, and I’m not sure anyone does, certainly not enough to keep the majority of fans at home from watching the Tar Heels and Orange face off in a second Final Four game today at NRG Stadium, not enough for the NCAA to stop perpetuating the myth that it holds academic standards for its athletes in the highest regard, not enough to slow the money-making train that has the most important basketball games of the season continuing to be played in football stadiums for nothing more than the greed of those whose pockets are being lined.

I have to believe no one on the selection committee saw this coming or hoped it would occur, but in North Carolina and Syracuse, you have two programs meeting today that have been stained with the mess of academic fraud.

Who thought a No. 10 seed in the Orange would advance this far, anyway?

The Tar Heels await word on expected punishment from an 18-year embarrassment in which players were steered toward classes that didn’t exist.

Paper classes that yielded athletes high grades.

Fake as that diamond ring in the Cracker Jack box.

Syracuse was found to have committed more than a dozen infractions of NCAA rules over 10 years, including academic fraud, extra benefits, failing to follow its drug-testing policy and a lack of institutional control, all leading to coach Jim Boeheim being suspended for the first nine games of the Atlantic Coast Conference schedule this season.

“All that stuff that I sometimes call junk has been talked about too much,” Williams said. “I’m tired of it. We have, in my opinion, the greatest sporting event there is, the Final Four. It’s about four schools, four teams, four coaching staffs that have worked their tails off to get here. Our teams are here because they played their way here. They had nothing to do with all that stuff. It had nothing to do with all these players.

“Jimmy went to Syracuse. I went to North Carolina. We’ve always loved those places, perhaps more than any other coaches.”

None of which has anything to do with the facts of each case, which are as detailed as they are troubling. But at the center of the storm also exists this truth: That big-time college athletics is a Ferris wheel of acquisitiveness, going round and round with unprepared kids being accepted into universities they are ill-equipped to handle academically and coached by multimillionaires whose answer to the immense pressure to win is finding shortcuts for their players to take and remain eligible.

And all those NCAA posters and TV commercials and pamphlets promoting academic success across the landscape are nothing more than hypocritical propaganda encouraging a sham, an organization that in turn supports smaller divisions and their championships with the money made off fraudulent ones such as North Carolina and Syracuse.

The ride never stops.

It just gets dirtier at the top.

“Things can happen in your program,” Boeheim said. “You take responsibility for them and you go on. I think nine games was a severe punishment for a coach. If you don’t, you haven’t been through it. It’s severe.

“But when they say, ‘cheating,’ that’s not true. Cheating to me is intentionally doing something, like you wanted this recruit, you arranged a job for him, you called him when you shouldn’t. That’s cheating. I look at this as a violation. When rules are violated, there should be punishment.”

I was wrong.

Maybe this guy is Costanza.

Maybe nobody cares. Maybe for a few hours today, we should just enjoy another Final Four, two more national semifinals that will send its winners to Monday evening’s championship in this 76,000-seat structure.

But we also shouldn’t kid ourselves into believing this is something it’s not, especially when a Hall of Fame coach in his 40th season at Syracuse says with a straight face — or the bored smirk he constantly wears — he believes phone calls are more troubling than academic fraud.

Think about that when those NCAA TV spots about academically driven student-athletes come across your screen today, when the outside shots of a football stadium hosting basketball games are shown, when the Tar Heels and Orange tip things off in the second semifinal.

Enjoy the action and players and competition, but know also what is at its core.

All the stuff and junk Ol’ Roy doesn’t want anyone talking about.

Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be a heard on “Seat and Ed” on Fox Sports 1340 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. On Twitter: @edgraney