Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013
I have to say that it does bother me that people can compare this to UNC and then act like that means nothing. I also believe ND will get to the bottom o fit and apply appropriate punishment. Heck the Harvard cheating scandal shows that students can cheat anywhere. I just wish more questions were asked about the UNC scandal by the national media. I am sure they won't let this ND scandal go until they receive full discovery.
Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013
Unless it was academic tutors doing the school work or if the coaches knew about it, I really don't see what the big deal is. The story is basically: college students suspected of cheating. It happens everywhere. The fact that they are football players is irrelevant. ND (like Duke) has a history of investigating and doling out the appropriate punishment in line with their honor code. Most recently ND's star quarterback was suspended from school for a year because of cheating.
Turns out they were right, just not in the way they thought they were.
Of course, now UNC has provided a roadmap for cheating like mad and avoiding massive NCAA sanctions on a technicality-- just make sure that you have a few more non-athletes in the cheating program, and the NCAA flags it all as "academic, not athletic." All you have to do is not care about your reputation.
I have always believed that Duke Football and Basketball players go to real classes filled with non-athlete students, taking the same curriculum as the non-athlete's, same coursework, same tests, etc. I will continue to believe that until shown otherwise. Now, like any other "group" of people, not all of them take the same majors, and some majors are more difficult than others. Miles Plumlee for example started out in an extremely difficult major his freshman year, then changed majors as a Sophomore, but even there, did not drop down to basket weaving. It was still a solid major, just less difficult than the original.
So I would assume some take extremely difficult majors, others moderately difficult majors, and some take the easiest majors possible, but the point is, they all go to regular classes. With their travelling, they obviously have to miss class time and make that work up, but I believe the young man responsible for the basketball team's academics (name escapes me) is 100% on top of that at all times, making sure the guys know their requirements, and making sure the guys perform that work adequately, and finish their assignments on time.
Unless proven otherwise, I fully believe all of the above. If that makes me a naïve sucker then so be it.
There's a sharp distinction to be drawn between academic fraud committed by student-athletes and academic fraud committed by a university. The former can happen at any university, and it undoubtedly does. But the latter goes to the heart of a university's very commitment to academics, and I'm sure it's less common. People who see the two as somehow equivalent ("See, even ND does it, so cut UNC a break") have very poor discernment skills. Other posters have made approximately the same point above.
The two types of fraud are, however, related in this way: How a university responds to academic fraud by students says a lot about that core commitment to academics. ND is under a microscope on this one and really does have an institutional commitment to academics. So I'm pretty sure they'll handle it well, and UNC-CH will continue uncomfortably to sit at the far end of the "commitment to academics" spectrum. They need the Wainstein report and aggressive action by the UNC BoG to help bring them away from that end of the spectrum.
I would not be surprised if a majority of the Board of Governors come up with something like this:
- The actions of the UNC athletic department and certain academic departments are an embarrassment to the university, to its students and alumni, to the Board, and to me personally.
- We want our athletic teams to be successful in the conference and on a national basis, but we want the student-athletes who go to UNC to get a good college education. We do not believe the two objectives are incompatible.
- We hereby direct the UNC-CH Chancellor to ensure that (a) all student athletes admitted to UNC are capable of doing college-level work; (b) they take courses of instruction that lead toward an undergraduate degree at UNC; (c) all courses offered to athletes and other students meet the proper standards of the University of North Carolina; and (d) that academic counseling for athletes is independent of the athletic department and reports to the appropriate academic official.
As Henderson and I have both noted, the UNC scandal is not about athletes cheating but about UNC arranging fraudulent, undemanding courses of instruction that cheat both the athletes as students and their legitimate competitors in college sports.
Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013