This is from a friend who is NOT a UNC fan:
"This is the time of year on the sports calendar when the NCAA earns its keep. I believe that the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is the single best sporting event of the year; staging that event is the only thing that the NCAA does that is laudable; once the tournament gets going, I will have to forego any criticism or mocker of the NCAA until it is over – – unless of course they outdo themselves with outrageousness. However, in the past couple of weeks, the NCAA demonstrated its fecklessness. It stripped Louisville of its 2013 National Championship and ordered it to “vacate” 123 wins over several seasons.
In case you have forgotten, Louisville beat Michigan in the final game in that tournament. So, with Louisville’s title vacated one of two situations obtains:
- The losing team – Michigan – is declared the National Champion. That is the sort of thing that only seems logical in professional ‘rassling…
- There was no National Champion that year – meaning that the 67 games played in the tournament that year all meant nothing.
The foundation of the NCAA action here was the sex scandal surrounding players and recruits when an assistant coach was accused of hiring strippers and prostitutes to “entertain” the players and potential recruits. While that is sleazy enough to get you to think that the folks at Louisville deserve a public spanking, please consider this for a moment:
- North Carolina kept players eligible for NCAA events by having them take sham courses to keep their grades up. North Carolina was not punished for that because the school allowed anyone on campus to take the same courses – meaning that the “student-athletes” were not receiving any benefit not available to the student body at large.
So, here is the question for the NCAA:
- If that assistant coach had “opened up” these strip sessions and these prostitute visits to other members of the Louisville student body, would that have made all of this just a “local anomaly” that the school can deal with in whatever way it sees fit?"