“If UNC is doing it, are you telling me that the other 95% of public schools in this country who are nowhere as good academically as UNC are not doing it?”
Despite being tangled and seemingly held hostage in one of the most notable academic scandals in modern NCAA history, Clay Travis thinks North Carolina’s embarrassing involvement in a grade inflation network of deceptive paperless classes isn’t really big news for anyone naïve enough to believe it’s an isolated incident.
Travis believes Carolina’s messy predicament is wholly representative of how big time college sports schools maneuver in this country, whether you like it or not.
“Systematic academic fraud exists everywhere in college athletics,” Travis said. “If UNC, which is a top 5 public institution is doing it, then do you really think that all these other schools – Ole Miss, Nevada, Florida State – are somehow giving their athletes a rigorous review?”
Travis thought it was interesting that the NFL recently stopped releasing Wonderlic scores to the public, saying the league was doing a monumental favor to the NCAA to hide the fact that their collegiate athletes, some three and four-year, lettermen, were almost completely illiterate, even though by law, NCAA regulations considered their education satisfactory.
“There are many people who are being admitted to college campuses all over the country, primarily in men’s football and basketball, who otherwise would never end up on a college campus,” Travis said. “It’s clear academic fraud is occurring everywhere to get these kids in, to keep them eligible, to graduate them.”
Even though an apparent lynch mob of Carolina detractors want the NCAA to come down hard on the offending Tar Heels, Travis thinks a paradox arises in the fact that the NCAA knows exactly what’s going on across a large majority of college campuses, but they’ve got too much money in their pockets already to bother putting a bogus investigation together trying to discover something they already have known for years.
“There are a ton of people out there in the NCAA who don’t want this UNC academic investigation to go any further,” he said. “Ultimately what it shows is that their system is fundamentally corrupt and that the ‘student-athlete’ situation is fundamentally a lie.”