The NCAA’s North Carolina ruling reinforces its impotence

The North Carolina decision reveals the NCAA’s lack of power and should shape how we view its recruiting investigation.

Tonight, Roy Williams and the North Carolina Tar Heels will hang another national championship banner in the Dean Smith Center and they will do so without fear that any of the others already hanging in the rafters will be coming down.

That’s because on Friday morning, a Division I Committee on Infractions hearing panel announced that it “could not conclude that the University of North Carolina violated NCAA academic rules when it made available deficient Department of African and Afro-American Studies ‘paper courses’ to the general student body, including student-athletes.”

The Tar Heels were essentially accused of providing disproportionate benefits to student-athletes by having them enroll in said paper courses. They faced significant punishments, including vacated wins across multiple sports and postseason bans.

In the end, however, the panel could only prove two infractions: that a pair of individuals — the former department chair and a former curriculum secretary — did not cooperate with the investigation. The lone punishment will be a five-year show-cause penalty to one of those individuals.

The NCAA’s failure to render any inkling of a punishment in this matter is merely the latest reminder of its impotence as an investigative body and a suggestion of what is to come as it sets sail to probe college basketball recruiting.

Consider the two latest major investigations into the sport, which each lasted several years, but were conducted by different entities. The first, this one, handled by the NCAA and designed to investigate potential academic fraud at North Carolina was hindered by the organization’s inability to develop a credible record of facts.

While the panel concluded that it is not within the NCAA’s jurisdiction to determine whether or not academic fraud had occurred and also found that regular students benefited from the paper courses as much as the student athletes, it still had an opportunity to conclude that North Carolina had failed to monitor its athletics department.

However, the available evidence prevented them from doing so. “The limitations in the record required it to, at best, infer motives based on the large number of student-athletes who took the courses and received high grades,” the NCAA announced in its press release. Motive is often determined by testimony and testimony is not something the NCAA can compel. Hence, no punishment.

Now, consider the second, a three-year investigation into college basketball recruiting conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that resulted in the arrest of 10 individuals, including four assistant coaches, and continues to shake the sport at its core.

“But, Chris, the FBI has significantly better investigatory tools than the NCAA,” you scream loudly from the rooftops.

That the FBI has the ability to flip witnesses by threatening potential prison time, use wiretaps to record conversations, and subpoena testimony and documents is exactly the point. The NCAA is ill-equipped to enforce its own rulebook and to expect them to do otherwise, at this point, is insanity.

That this ruling comes the same week as the NCAA’s formation of a Commission on College Basketball designed to root out the supposedly nefarious influences involved in college basketball recruiting is frankly hysterical. The Commission was already largely viewed as a paper tiger, itself an attempt to cover up the fact that the NCAA had buried its head in the sand because it lacked the ability to follow through on investigating allegations of improper recruiting as the FBI had.

Next: The NCAA's Commission on College Basketball is missing one thing

In this instance, North Carolina and the NCAA are merely one in the same. Both the university and the organization designed farcical institutions aimed are presenting a proper public face. The Tar Heels used fake classes to disguise that the idea of student-athletes is very often a misnomer, especially when it comes to revenue sports, while the NCAA created an all bark, likely no bite Commission aimed at restoring the noble idea of amateurism in college basketball.

Without the powers of the FBI, the likely outcome of the Commission on College Basketball will be the same as this investigation. The NCAA will continue kicking and screaming about the external forces influencing the game on the floor while the teams on the court will go on raising those banners.