Butch’s redshirting dodge and a dubious poll (day 98)

This entry is nowhere near as good as last night’s.  I’d like to thank the other members of the SFN author team for adding content and providing research for yesterday’s brilliant and monolithic Burney expose’. 

The first thing to cover tonight is the topic we left off with last night — UNC’s apparent plan to use redshirt years to avoid suspensions.  As you can read about in this WRAL piece, Butch plans to redshirt Charles Brown and may do so with Ryan Houston.

Regarding Brown, that linked article provides this Butch quote:

And then Charlie Brown found out that he’s going to be put on probation for two semesters. He’s got one year of eligibility remaining, so he’ll stay on the football team and obviously he’ll get a chance to practice and go through spring practice and use this year as a red-shirt year.

The loophole Butch is trying to exploit has to do with an NCAA bylaw that allows a school to dispense its own discipline regarding academic cheating so long as the cheating was not connected to a school staff member (discussed at length here): 

If a student-athlete commits an academic offense (e.g., cheating on a test, plagiarism on a term paper) with no involvement of an institutional staff member, the institution is not required to report a violation of Bylaw 10.1-(b), unless the academic offense results in an erroneous declaration of eligibility and the student-athlete subsequently competes for the institution.

I have two things to say. First, it appears that the tutor in question was being privately employed by the head football coach in Brown’s scenario, so the NCAA may find “involvement” (if not worse).  Second, Brown was also reportedly possibly involved in the agent prong.  Butch is playing with fire with this redshirting stunt. It looks EXACTLY like UNC is trying to avoid scandal-related suspensions with this redshirt dodge.

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So after I was totally done writing this entire entry, I saw that the Bleacher Report had published this piece on the UNC redshirting plan, agreeing with me (and a lot of other people).  I don’t have time to parse it for you and grab quotes, but the whole thing is right on the money.  I wish they had put it up earlier.

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Next I need to touch on this goofy poll that came out today.  I want to focus on the N&O’s presentation of it.

From the N & O piece:

Only 14 percent of Carolina fans want Davis to be fired with 57 percent preferring that he continue as the coach and 29 percent having no opinion. 41 percent of fans approve of Davis’ overall job performance to only 20 percent who disapprove, numbers any politician would love to have.

I am not sure that “any politician would love to have” a 41 percent approval rating, but whatever, so far I am totally bored.  But get a load of where they go next:

“These numbers would seem to suggest that UNC fans don’t think the program’s current issues are Davis’ fault and that they appreciate the strides the team has made on the field since he became coach,” PPP director Tom Jensen says. “And they would suggest that Chancellor Holden Thorp and Athletic Director Dick Baddour’s strong continued support of Davis is meeting favor with their ‘constituents.'”

 ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?  To represent that you can reach those conclusions from that raw data is totally laughable.  Something must be going on here.  Sure enough, it is!  This cat Tom Jensen, who is presented as some sort of objective pollster, is actually a big UNC football fan, as you can see here, where he is advocating that people come out to support the UNC football team.  Clearly he has an agenda that is reflected in his comments about the poll numbers, if not in the poll itself. 

To be clear, I think it is super that Jensen is a UNC football fan and I have no problem with his pro-Butch agenda.  I am just pointing out that he is not necessarily an objective analyst.