ironman02;1439757 wrote:Oh, you mean like this? When did Carolina's basketball program get punished for knowingly benefitting from the AFAM department? When was it proven that the athletic department steered basketball players into those classes, while knowing that academic fraud was being committed by a professor and another member of the department? It's just as likely that the department had always had a reputation for easy classes, well before any misconduct occurred. Just like everywhere else, several of the athletes took easier classes in order to decrease their academic workload, while staying eligible.
I don't know what the whole truth behind the academic scandal is, but I do know that as of this moment, Carolina basketball hasn't been proven to have knowingly broken any rules. Athletes, as well as regular students, benefitted from those classes. Does it seem suspicious? Sure does. Just about as suspicious as Lance Thomas and his jewelry.
I've tried to let this go twice now. I have even told you that my intention was to simply point out that titles shouldn't be vacated for off the court issues, but you turned this into a Carolina vs. Duke thing because I made a poor choice in how I worded a post. Looks like I'm not the only one who made that mistake.
Fair enough. "Knowingly" was the wrong word. However, there is a distinct difference between the UNC academic scandal and the Lance Thomas case. UNC was in fact doing something wrong -- at least the university, if not the basketball program directly -- by essentially making up a pretend degree that involved forged grades, very few if any tests and crooked instructors, a degree in which scores of Tar Heel basketball players reportedly pursued over the years.
Lance Thomas paid $30,000 of what is believed to have been his own money -- nothing we know indicates otherwise -- to buy jewelry and then got a loan based off the proof of his down payment. Some say the loan was based on his status as a five points per game role player at Duke who at the time, at best, had a future playing for the Fort Wayne Mad Ants. I say that if any college kid walked into that particular NYC jewelry establishment with 30 g's in cash, the store would have given them a loan on the spot, knowing that if the customer was good for $30,000, even if they didn't come through on the loan, they could probably sue the family regardless. Again, Rafaello & Co. has already proven to be shady based on its sketchy past, which includes selling stolen merchandise and filing civil suits serially, so who knows what happened.
