If you missed it this weekend, the News & Observer/Charlotte Observer took a deeper dive into the type of ‘student’ athletes being admitted – and curiously remaining eligible – within the John Bunting & Butch Davis football programs at UNC-Chapel Hill.
The article is available here and a discussion had already been launched here on our forums.
The most revealing information in the article was the sheer scope and quantity of academic exceptions at UNC that the Observers verified:
At UNC, about half of the football recruiting classes over the past six years have been admitted to school through a special committee process required for students who fall below academic requirements. Those recruits include athletes who scored below 900 on the SAT or were in the lower half of their high school class.
[snip]
At N.C. State – which often recruits the same in-state athletes as UNC – 15 football players have gone before a special admissions committee since 2006 because they did not meet minimum curriculum requirements set by the UNC-system Board of Governors.
Gee. That sounds familiar.!? Where might I have heard something like that before?
Oh yes…ON STATEFANSNATION. Just about two months before the N&O published it.
With this said, I implore you to go back and read this fantastic entry from OCTOBER 7TH. Please don’t just read the following as the quote from the October 7th entry as the entire is vital to this conversation (and I would really like to pump our pageviews some with some inter-linking)
Thorp’s comments didn’t square with some of the unverified information SFN has received regarding the academic prong of the current scandal as we have previously heard that an astronomical number – something along the lines of 45% to 50% – of Butch Davis’ recruits have been admitted by ‘special committee’ (once referred to as “academic exceptions†until Carolina hilariously did away with that designation years ago.)
Well…this information is no longer ‘unverified’. But, you had a feeling of its existence two months ago if you read SFN.
Soon, we will tackle the most obvious question of, “How in the world do all of these academic ‘committee cases’ remain academically eligible with such ease?†As the article points out:
UNC officials say 49 out of 59 seniors who have played for Davis have graduated. Of the 17 seniors on this year’s team, officials say, 13 will graduate in December, and the other four are on schedule to get their degrees in May.
But a gulf exists at UNC between the traditional academic markers of its freshmen recruits and the overall student body. Incoming football recruits have had an average SAT score that ranges from nearly 300 to 400 points below that of the overall UNC freshman class for much of the past decade, according to numbers provided by UNC officials.
