Rashad McCants has dropped a bombshell that has exploded on the University of North Carolina’s storied basketball program and left shrapnel everywhere.
The Tar Heels have had a reputation for running a clean program ever since Dean Smith took over in the early 60’s. They win big — capturing five national championships and advancing to a record 18 Final Fours– and they typically win with class.
But McCants, the second leading scorer on UNC’s 2005 national championship team, took a sledge hammer to that pristine image when he went on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” and claimed tutors wrote his papers, he rarely went to class about half his time at UNC and remained able to play largely because he took bogus courses designed to keep athletes academically eligible.
McCants told “Outside the Lines” he could have been academically ineligible to play during the championship season if it had not been for the assistance. He further claimed UNC’s Hall of Fame coach Roy Williams told him about the “paper class” system at the school in which students were not required to attend class and were required to submit only one term paper to receive a grade.
McCants also told the show he even made the dean’s list in the spring of 2005 despite not attending any of his four classes for which he received straight A’s. He said advisers and tutors who worked with the program steered him to take the paper classes within the Afro and African-American studies program.
We’ve heard about these type of allegations before, when the Raleigh News and Observer began to report widespread academic fraud at UNC in Dec. 2012 involving students, including 18 football players and one former football player. The NCAA told UNC officials that even though there were unauthorized grade changes, forged faculty signatures on grade rolls and limited or no class time in the AFAM department, the school apparently did not break any rules because it was an academic scandal, not an athletic one.
The newspaper reported last December that basketball players on the national title team accounted for 15 enrollments in the classes.
Carolina has conducted an independent investigation headed up by former Gov. Jim Martin and discovered that 54 classes were irregularly taught from the summer of 2007 through 2011, but the investigation was limited in scope to that period of time.
The NCAA sanctioned the football program for improper benefits and academic misconduct involving a tutor in 2012, but UNC’s athletic program emerged from the scandal largely unscathed.
If the NCAA is as serious about the academic integrity as it claims, it’s time to send an investigative team to Chapel Hill to get to the bottom of this and make sure athletes are taking legitimate courses and are being held to the same standards of attending classes, writing papers and taking exams. For all the talk the NCAA does about amateurism, academic integrity is an issue that is as equally troubling as point shaving on college campuses. It is probably more common than the average fan would assume, but it is a dirty little secret no one wants to talk about.
McCants claimed it was common for basketball players to major in African-American Studies and said he told the network he assumed tutors writing papers for athletes was expected (as crazy as that sounds) so he didn’t question it while he attended UNC.
“I thought it was a part of the college experience, just like watching it on a movie from ‘He Got Game’ or ‘Blue Chips,'” McCants claimed in the ESPN interview. . “… When you get to college, you don’t go to class, you don’t do nothing, you just show up and play. That’s exactly how it was, you know, and I think that was the tradition of college basketball, or college, period, any sport. You’re not there to get an education, though they tell you that.
“You’re there to make revenue for the college. You’re there to put fans in the seats. You’re there to bring prestige to the university by winning games.”
McCants has a history of making outrageous statements in the past. He was the same guy who claimed playing for Carolina was “like being in jail. You couldn’t do anything. You couldn’t say anything.” He is making up for lost time. McCants claimed he was better than 95 percent of the NBA players two years after he was released from the league. Now, after a short stay in European basketball, he is back home, without a degree, looking to write a tell-all book which could mirror “Personal Fouls,” the damaging expose on NC State basketball written by former Wolfpack manager Peter Golenbock that eventually cost coach Jim Valvano his job.
Williams, for his part, has strongly disagreed with McCant’s allegations and his portrayal of the university as an athletic factory that keeps its athletes eligible by putting them in crib courses. “In no way did I know about or do anything close to what he says,” he said in a statement.
McCants has a copy of his transcript marked “unofficial” that seemingly supports part of his claims.
A copy of McCants’ university transcript, labeled “unofficial” shows that in his non-African-American Studies classes, McCants received six C’s, one D and three F’s. In his African-American Studies classes, 10 of his grades were A’s, six B’s, one a C and a D. The UNC registrar’s office declined to send McCants an official, signed transcript because of a May 2005 hold on its release. According to the UNC athletic department, McCants had university property that had never been returned.
A second copy of his transcript that was obtained from a different source by “Outside the Lines” is identical to the first and is also not signed by the registrar but does not contain the label “unofficial.”
McCants said his first year he went to class and took several legitimate courses. But overall, his transcript shows he ended up with more than 50 percent of his courses being African-American Studies classes.
Proving Williams directed him to crib courses to keep him eligible will be difficult since it is strictly hearsay. But McCants’ transcript paints a disturbing picture of the lengths that even elite programs with sterling academic records allegedly will go to keep impact players eligible.
