In general, the NCAA doesn’t interfere or control the university’s academic business. They have placed requirements on high school classes and SAT scores for entering college, but say very little about what happens after an athlete is enrolled. So is a no-show, one-paper class acceptable to the NCAA? Even today, the NCAA would probably say that the university is responsible for the academic requirements for any given class, department, or major.
I believe that this is where UNC screwed up when they took money away from Prof ‘Roo. This action proves that his classes DO NOT meet UNC’s own requirements and thus these classes are fraudulent. The fact that the fraud classes included regular students along with a high percentage of athletes doesn’t change the fact the classes were fraudulent.
If I were on the NCAA team, I would simply ask for an explanation of how UNC justifies uses fraudulent classes when determining eligibility for ANY athlete. When the stammering stopped, it would then be time to recalculate the eligibility of ALL athletes with fraudulent classes on their transcript. ANY team that used ineligible athletes would be required to forfeit all games in which those athletes played. (Look at the the FSU case that was just finishing up when Marvin started tweeting for a reference.)
The fact that regular students attended the fraudulent classes is another big mess that UNC doesn’t want to acknowledge. Basically, UNC sold class credits to the students..no work required, just cash. (Que up all of the jokes about mail-order degrees.) It would be a very bad day for UNC if this issue caused their accreditation to come into question.
