CHAPEL HILL — Joe Nocera, a New York Times columnist who has expressed his disdain for the NCAA and infrastructure of major college athletics, wrote a column worth reading about Michael McAdoo’s academic experience at North Carolina.
McAdoo is the former Tar Heels’ defensive lineman who, during the NCAA’s investigation into the UNC football program, was ruled permanently ineligible. He fought to have his eligibility restored, and later sued the NCAA and UNC. A North Carolina appeals court recently upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss the case.
To the surprise of no one, given how his time at UNC turned out, McAdoo didn’t leave Chapel Hill with fond memories. He told Nocera: “I would still like to get a college degree someday. But not at the University of North Carolina. They just wasted my time.”
McAdoo described to Nocera how he arrived at UNC aspiring to major in criminal justice – a major that UNC doesn’t have. Instead, McAdoo told the Times, a counselor chose his major for him: African-American Studies. McAdoo told the Times that he was “assigned” a Swahili independent studies course that never met. Those kinds of AFAM no-show courses were at the center of both an internal university investigation, and more recent investigation that former Gov. Jim Martin directed.
Nocera writes that the real scandal isn’t the one that McAdoo found himself implicated in during his time at UNC. No, the real scandal, Nocera writes, “is what goes on under the rubric of ‘academic counseling.’”
McAdoo spent the 2012 season with the Baltimore Ravens. After a preseason injury, he was placed on the team’s injured reserve list.
Comments
Hmm
Wed, 02/06/2013 - 11:02 — restonpack1I have to ask ... if he was an "okay" student and his mother was a school teacher, and he wanted to major in Criminal Justice, how did he manage to pick the one school without a Criminal Justice major? The list of degree programs at UNC-CH is not secret, even if the football and athletics staff lied to him. It's easily verifiable online.
That said, it's obvious to anybody who reads this story that the athletic counselors were pushing players into fraudulent classes and programs; which pretty plainly should mean that many/most UNC-CH players should be retroactively ineligible going back to whenever this system started, or at least as far back as it can be demonstrated to have existed (so far, we're back to the late 90s via Peppers).
Where is the ACC John Swofford?? Where is the ncaa????
Wed, 02/06/2013 - 09:16 — mcpack11How can the ACC office and/or the ncaa sit back and ignore this? McAdoo point-blank contradicts the only possible line of defense that unc* could muster from the "honorable" Jim Martin's "investigation."
Swofford and Emert: DO YOUR JOB!
The proverbial canary.
Tue, 02/05/2013 - 16:02 — eastern1984The proverbial canary.
.
Tue, 02/05/2013 - 17:08 — eastern1984.