24. UNC gets caught with questionable academic practices
The North Carolina Tar Heels have been one of the NCAA’s model programs for decades, but even they aren’t immune to their share of controversy. Thanks to our friends at Chapel Hill, we have another new category that will become a common theme on this list: academic violations.
The school found itself in hot water thanks to allegations that certain majors were being created just to help athletes remain eligible with easier coursework. One that caught the NCAA’s attention was North Carolina’s African and Afro-American Studies department, which contained more than 200 classes regarded as questionable.
The football team was heavily involved in this major, which saw a ton of players enrolled in lecture classes that never met and sketchy independent study courses, but several basketball players were enrolled as well. One of the most prominent examples was Tar Heels’ shooting guard Rashad McCants, a starter on the school’s 2005 national championship team.
In an interview with ESPN’s Outside the Lines in 2014, McCants claimed that he took bogus classes and had tutors write papers for him. The other members of that team all denied McCants’ allegations, and head coach Roy Williams also refuted McCants’ claims.
North Carolina made a lot of academic reforms as a result of this scandal, and the NCAA declined to issue any penalties against the basketball program since there was no clear evidence they had violated any academic rules. The fact that the courses were open for anyone to take, and not just catered to athletes, was the NCAA’s justification for not imposing sanctions against North Carolina.