The easiest solution is for the NFL to have a minor league system. That way kids that want/need to play for money and only want to play in the NFL can go straight to the minors, kids that want to be student athletes can play CFB. You never see scandals involving college baseball or college hockey because kids who want paid or can't perform academically just go to the minors rather than college.

Everyone is doing it. It's like doping in professional cycling. There will always be the Lance Armstrong supporters who insist that not everyone is doing it, in particular Lance is clean, but by now it is obvious to nearly everyone that they are just idiots with blinders on for ideological reasons. Some programs are cleanish, meaning they hide it better, they don't let in the outright criminals, they have a bit of self-control, but none of them are clean. There is a huge infrastructure, parallel to the university but not really subject to its control, that masquerades under names like "athletic foundation" and "booster club" that provides all manner of institutionalized "support" to "student"-athletes. Of course the university is corrupt too. In the Ray Goff years, the job of the president of the university of Alabama was in constant danger. He had better attend to what really matters. The football coach is often the highest paid employee of the university, or among the top three or tour. A fourth year starting tailback who was functionally illiterate is someone who should not have graduated middle school but somehow obtained a university degree before going to the NFL combine (he didn't make it). That doesn't happen without a lot of help along the way. Some of that help comes from overawed instructors who react the way a lot of people do in front of quasi-celebrity, by facilitating and fawning, and some of it comes through the "legitimate" institutional channels, like the "tutors" hired to "help" with homework, and the special testing center for student-athletes who have to miss regular exams because of competitions, where the exams are administered by special non-instructional staff. Later there is the "tutor" who goes to class to check that they are there, even to take notes for them, who comes to office hours to check on their progress, to pressure the professor when need be, etc. Later this same "tutor" is not an employee of the university, rather some foundation the university knows nothing about, and the professor was the one in error by violating student privacy by talking to him ... These people have a lot of practice doing what they do, and there is a lot of money at stake, and they have built a lot of the malfeasance into the system. Later the faculty don't really care or are naive or easily subject to pressure - it's a huge hassle to try to do anything about this nonsense - better just to avoid giving those classes - so it falls in the lap of part-time non-permanent instructors (who are of course much more likely to play ball). There are huge double standards at work too. Some marginal OL player is not going to be treated the same way as the future second rounder. The school takes a hard line with one so it can look the other way with the other, and when he gets caught can protest that it made a mistake just that once. One guy has trouble with a girl and they take away his scholarship, the other guy (who two years later went to prison for shooting his dealer) shows a graduate student instructor the gun in his belt and they threaten to take away the grad student's funding.

No one is saying they are all the same - right now some programs are dirtier than others - just like Contador is not as dirty as Armstrong was. The best indicator of a cleanish program is that it hasn't won **** recently.

Why are the tutors not just other students who have previously taken the classes? Seems like that would be more effective than outsiders. Also TAs are a thing.

Cause they need people in on it. I've tutored at UNC, I can tell you I didn't cheat and wouldn't cheat. I've seen 2 basketball players in the bschool and I knew both were relatively smart--T Zeller and Black Falcon, but they are probably and most definitely exceptions.

Cause it's the amateurism that makes college sports great?

Lol'd

GTFO there was actually a non-superhero named Black Falcon.

I wish your tutor would have split this into paragraphs for you.

Just talked to some friends that went to Duke, they're loling at the self-righteousness in this thread. When I told them Coach K stopped by the classes they laughed and said there was probably cheese on a trap in the corner of the room somewhere but he held off because people were around.

The stuff you mention does happen everywhere to some extent and certainly isnt restricted solely to athletic teams. What UNC is accused of is much more serious and is at a different level than just "bro take the class with this professor he is an automatic A" or people using test banks / term paper banks etc.

UNC had entire sham no-show classes and made hundreds of unauthorized grade changes for athletes using forged signatures. All of this with full knowledge/consent/participation of faculty members , not rogue boosters, or tutors but the faculty and staff themselves actually colluded to do this. Tenured faculty around the country are not going out of their way to invent no-show classes for their students and in any sane institution doing so would set off alarm bells at the curriculum committee.

I went to a big D-1 school and had friends who played football/basketball and while some low level bs went on, it was certainly nothing like what is called out in the UNC report.

It's all bad. What UNC is awful, but to say other schools are less bad b/c their cheating is slightly less cheating is pretty awful. The whole thing should be fixed but won't be because of the money involved.

Well... yeah. Guilty.

It was basically all AFAM from reading the report. Nobody in the MBA or business school or whatever else should have their rep tarnished (they might get their rep tarnished, but they shouldn't imo).

Shutting them down is a weird question because it's basically all sports.

even as a huge UNC hater, I wouldn't want people's opinions of UNC as an academic institution overall to change. The whole thing seems isolated to AFAM, so nobody should be questioning the chemistry kids or slamming the rest of the university. The AFAM program and the athletics department are fair game, fire away. But if anyone's non-AFAM UNC degree is going to get devalued in the marketplace, that really sucks for them and it's pretty unfair imo. UNC is still a very good school.

It's really a question of scale. I was at UGA for 7-8 years and learned how it went down there. The huge majority of football players were clustered into 3 or 4 majors. 'Housing' was the biggest one. Yes, there was a major just called 'Housing'. That said, it wasn't a bunch of fraud or scamming, it was just a massively, massively easy major with a ton of classes that were stupidly simple. The players did have to actually show up and the school hired students to check on them (AA literally would pay 8 bucks an hour to freshmen to run around campus, ducking your head in the door to make sure players xyz are in the classroom). UGA also had the Harrick Jr scandal, but that was a fairly isolated event with 3 basketball players and one assistant coach that got caught right away.

I guess the point here is that every single school has ways to accommodate really stupid athletes, but it's usually with really easy majors and huge amounts of tutoring. Most athletes do still go to class and I would think few schools actually had this type of thing going on.

Oh yea, the easy classes with subject matter than anyone could master and a very very light workload definitely occur everywhere. The issue is that in these cases those classes are not disguised as something else and everyone knows what they are and doesn't give people who only take those classes much credit for getting a degree. They also still require you to pass on merit. Some have no attendance requirement and a heavily weighted but very easy midterm and final/paper to accomplish this while others count attendance and participation at like 50% so even if you just get a 50% on the final you still manage a C just by showing up and talking a few times a class/semester depending on class size.

Yeah, there's a huge difference between "most athletes are in this major" and "athletes are actively turning in the same exact paper and having ETHICAL DECISION MAKING teachers ask compliance what grade the student needs to make in order to stay eligible. Like, this shouldn't be a shocking thing to say or difficult to understand.

Dr. Ocean?!

Grunching a bit, but watched the Deunta Williams and Rashad McCants interviews, and one part of it I'm not really understanding. Why are the athletes playing the role of victim here? Nothing was stopping them from actually showing up, trying hard, or taking real classes. I understand that they are phenomenally stupid, probably went to terrible high schools, and all that. But thats an argument for them not being allowed to go to UNC, not an argument that they were a victim in this scandal. And I get that their argument is "this university should have helped us more, and let us stay eligible legitimately." Which sounds like a good argument, but the problem is these guys are really ****ing stupid. Sure, UNC could have devoted the time and resources to actually educating some of these kids, and bringing them up to a level where they could pass college courses legitimately. And morally and ethically, from the view of an institution of higher learning, of course they should have.

But that would have entailed not playing football/basketball, for at least a year, maybe longer. Thats the type of time and effort that would have been required. Certainly the athletes would not have been interested in that, nor the coaches. If it takes a year plus to get them up to speed, they wouldnt be offered scholarships in the first place, and instead of a joke degree, they would have a joke gas station uniform.

How are they a victim here? They got an opportunity to try out for the NFL/NBA/whatever, and their consolation prize for failing was a real diploma from a real university, albeit an unearned one. They missed out on a real education, that they werent paying for anyway and which if they had truly wanted was available to them with effort.

Its not like the alternative to this cheating scandal is every athlete gets a phenomenal education, they all graduate with a 3.8 and all go on to have stunningly successful professional careers in a wide variety of vocations. The non-cheating alternative to this is a bunch of kids cant stay eligible, get kicked out of school, and probably end up making widgets for minimum wage or in jail. The other students at UNC and to a lesser extent (way lesser, lol NCAA sports fans) the fans of the sports are the only ones with any sort of legit claim at victimhood. Maybe also anyone who has recently hired a UNC grad.

Sort of? I mean it isnt the product on the field. Its the history and tradition (and vicariousness), which are inextricably linked with the amateurism.

Well yeah it's easy to an outside observer to say this (and you're right) but the reason they are playing the victim is they probably don't realize how stupid they are and think that if UNC helped them more they could have "earned" their degree while still playing because some of their teammates were able to. Honestly, possibly going back to implementing the freshman sit out rule while having a minor league for the kids who didn't want to go to school might work out best. But as you said there's just no way that a lot of these kids could get up to par while also playing a full home/away schedule in D1 basketball or football.

Nah I'm pretty okay with saying what other schools are doing is less bad than what UNC did.

Big difference between:

Steering kids to easy majors / soft professors (what every school does)

inventing fake no-show Swahili classes for them to all get A's in and to circumvent the school's foreign language requirement (what UNC did, among many others)

Nah, that's just how long it takes a UGA student to finish their bachelor's degree.

"LOL @ U and UR ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE THAT THIS DOESN'T HAPPEN EVERYWHERE, SEE MY ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE PROVING THAT IT DOES HAPPEN EVERYWHERE"

It happens everywhere inasmuch as most universities offer independant student classes that functionally totally on trust and are super easily exploitable. I've worked on the admin side of things like this- and there's just no way you could reasonably have all the checks and balances you need in place to make sure that bull**** classes don't happen.

The degree of established infrastructure that existed at UNC is anything but standard and super shocking in how flagrant it was. It's either amazing nobody got pissed off and spoke up earlier, or amazing how effective they were at silencing people that did.

Act-Utilitarianism gonna bring another down. Pretty awesome though. I took an ethics class and I felt my professor was highly unethical, and one of the worst options of all the faculty to be teaching the class.

So was Mia Hamm a part of this, or is it still OK to buy a Mazda?

Every athletic department for every school should be abolished.

Yes, really.

Needs more