Media Locked and Loaded, What Will Happen to UNC?

The big time media has finally started to focus in on the scandal in Chapel Hill that just keeps getting deeper and deeper. It all started with a tweet from Marvin Austin and led to a report about players getting benefits. As it was examined deeper it came out that players for forging papers right off the internet. That led to the NCAA looking into the university a little closer. Although they did nothing about it, they did find that there was entire courses of study that didn’t require attendance or work. Next, it was former UNC basketball player Will Graves, who was dismissed from the Tarheel team in 2010, getting caught with weed while renting a very expensive house from Roy Williams.

Sounds crazy when you put it all in one paragraph, doesn’t it? Well, what’s even crazier is the fact that UNC is pretty much getting away with a slap on the wrist.

Now, this isn’t the first time an ACC team has been in trouble with the NCAA. NC State also faced trouble back in the late 80s. There were reports of players getting paid, point-shaving, and a program that was out of control. So the NCAA launched an investigation. They never found proof of players being paid or anything involving point-shaving. What they did find was that players were selling their shoes and their tickets for extra money. That’s it. The state-appointed Poole Commission issued a 32-page report that concluded that there were no major violations of NCAA regulations, and that Valvano and his staff’s inadequate oversight of players’ academic progress violated “the spirit, not the letter of the law.” NC State then put themselves on a 2 year probation.

NC State is still, to this day, trying to mend the wounds from that controversy that ended up being a lot of rumor and not much fact. Meanwhile UNC is out there breaking every rule in the book, yet still chugging along with very few penalties.

For a while I wondered if that was it. If UNC was simply so bullet-proof that they could do whatever they wanted and would be protected by the league, the NCAA and major media. I almost came to the realization that as long as we’re State fans, we’ll have to live with the fact that UNC is untouchable.

That was until the past week. That’s when for whatever reason, the big dogs came out to play. CNN and Business Week both hammered UNC on a national level. Business Week’s Paul Barrett even vowed to help the News and Observer’s Dan Kane (who has been on this story since the beginning), saying this:

In coming weeks and months, I hope I can supplement Kane’s dogged efforts with some long-distance perspective. Valuable tips from concerned local people, some of them UNC alumni, are already pouring in, and that’s part of the reason I’m going to pursue the story. Keep those e-mails coming.

Here are the two articles I was referring to:

CNN: Some college athletes play like adults, read like 5th-graders

Business Week: Scandal Bowl: Why Tar Heel Fraud Might Be Just the Start

So what happens next? Is this the beginning of the end for UNC, or is this just another bullet the Heels will dodge?  We really want your opinion. What is your take on all this and what’s going to happen next? Talk about it here in this forum thread.