Report: '04-05 UNC title team had multiple players taking phony courses
This could be very bad for the school, the team, Roy Williams -- and may lead to that national title banner coming down.
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The 2004-2005 national championship-winning North Carolina Tar Heels men's basketball team was rife with players who were enrolled in phony classes, according to a damning follow-up report from the Raleigh News & Observer.
Saturday's story was a specific continuation to a June story from the paper and its reporter, Dan Kane, who reported five players who were part of the academic fraud culture that permeated through the athletic department and to UNC's overall student body. A devastating independent investigation/report released in October by former by U.S. Justice Department Kenneth Wainstein revealed the Afro and African American Studies department was subject to spurious courses from 1993 through 2011, and that more than 1,500 student-athletes at the university were beneficiaries of the fraud during that 18-year run.
This most recent reports states 35 sham courses were taken by some of the players on that legendary 2004-05 title team. Nine of those courses were occupied by Tar Heel basketball players during the 2004 fall semester, the remaining 26 in the spring, as UNC made its march as a No. 1 seed to winning its first of two national championships under Roy Williams.
This is all very relevant and pertinent information, given the NCAA has re-opened its investigation of the matter. With that in mind, the punishments on the table for North Carolina are potentially historic.
Because federal law protects them, the Wainstein report and the News & Observer have not specifically identified the former UNC basketball players who were involved in the so-called "paper classes" at any point during almost-two-decades-long tainted era.
Some more information from the N&O:
The classes, some advertised as lectures but that never met and others listed as independent studies, were supervised by Deborah Crowder, a manager in African and Afro-American studies who [Wainstein] says graded required end-of-semester work leniently as part of a “paper class” scheme to keep athletes eligible. Crowder was not a professor and admitted to investigators that she assigned grades without reading the papers.
The N&O reported in June that five members of the championship team, including four key players, had relied heavily on the paper classes: 52 enrollments during their time at UNC. The Wainstein documents, however, have more detail and show a heavy concentration during the spring semester of 2005, when the team was driving toward a national title. ... At least five players took three bogus classes each, the Wainstein documents show.
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The Wainstein documents also reveal a friendly relationship between Crowder and Wayne Walden, coach Roy Williams’ hand-picked academic counselor for the basketball team. They show the two working together to get players into the classes and Walden providing tickets and other team freebies to Crowder.
The information, to an extent, correlates with the claims made by a member of that team, Rashad McCants, who publicly went about discrediting Roy Williams and the University of North Carolina in the spring. McCants claimed he almost never did work assigned to him and admitted to having many of his papers written by tutors at the school. Despite this, he made dean's list in 2005. Wainstein's report noted that many of McCants' claims could not be corroborated, however.
Wainstein's report states that 363 former men's basketball players were enrolled in bogus courses of an 18-year period, which averages to slightly more than 20 per year.
Crowder, depicted as the primary orchestrater of the academic scandal in the Wainstein report, retired from the school in 2009.
