http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/story/19794788/north-carolina-cheated-and-prospered-and-now-its-time-for-the-reckoning
And to North Carolina's shame on so many levels, the cover was blown by a fan at North Carolina State.
Think about that. UNC football -- and probably basketball -- is going down, and it'll go down in part because a member of the PackPride message board found a damaging transcript belonging to a former UNC athlete. Humiliating, and not just because the whistle was blown by a fan of N.C. State, a school many UNC graduates look down upon.
Humiliating also because it underscores just how ignorant North Carolina wanted to be. UNC officials didn't want to know what was happening, so they stuck their heads in the dirt -- and it just got worse. How bad?
Maybe the ugliest academic scandal in NCAA history.
This one is worse than what happened in 2007 at Florida State. I mean, it's not even close. Florida State had some numbers that looked bad -- 61 athletes from 10 different teams -- but this UNC scandal dwarfs it.
FSU had 61 tainted players, almost all from the same class.
North Carolina has at least 54 tainted classes.
How many athletes were given free grades from the Department of African and Afro-American Studies? We don't know. UNC never wanted to find out, but the school has no choice now. The school mustered a halfhearted search for the truth earlier this year when it found those 54 tainted classes, but its search went back only to 2007. Despite efforts from the Raleigh News & Observer that suggested otherwise, the school held firm that the academic fraud started in 2007.
Enter the N.C. State fan and the found transcript. It belonged to former UNC two-sport star Julius Peppers.
It was from 2001.
See what we have here? We have evidence not only of grades being given to athletes for at least a decade -- but also that UNC academic support staff steered athletes to those classes. This can't be dismissed as the rogue actions of a man named Julius Nyang'oro, the embattled former head of the Department of African and Afro-American Studies. If it was just him, well, that could be explained away to a certain extent. The school would be vulnerable to NCAA sanctions, but one man running amok? That's not horrible.
What actually happened at North Carolina?
This is horrible.