By Julie Glass
We’re plum out of outrage about the NCAA’s decision that North Carolina should get no major penalty — death penalty would have been what any other school but a blue blood would have received!.
So here’s what Pat Forde of Yahoo Sports thinks:
Let history record this as the week the National Collegiate Athletic Association completed its descent from flawed to failed.
The governing body of college sports is useless when it comes to policing itself. Mall cops think the NCAA is soft on crime.
That nice office space it occupies in Indianapolis? Vacate it, since the powers-that-be couldn’t find a way to vacate anything belonging to North Carolina after a school-acknowledged 18 years of brazen academic fraud, a good portion of which tainted the Tar Heels’ 2005 and ’09 basketball national championships.
That was the news Friday – in arguably its most anticipated ruling ever, the NCAA Committee on Infractions admitted that it is powerless to apply any real penalties to blueblood Carolina after more than 1,000 athletes got bogus grades for sham classes. And it followed the news Wednesday that the NCAA’s response to a massive corruption scandal in college basketball was to form a committee, while federal investigators do the spadework exposing a decades-old system of third parties buying players.
It’s a dirty sport. And the NCAA doesn’t even own a decent broom.
The North Carolina ruling was bound to infuriate people, no matter what the NCAA decided. It was a tricky, contentious case that did not neatly fit the association’s bulky rules manual. The intrigue was whether the COI could find a way around its own bylaw limitations to make a penalty stick, or let the Heels skate on a technicality.
