Davis on 620AM: ‘How Should I Know?!’ [3:00P UPDATE]

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UPDATE AT BOTTOM OF POST

In the work lag due to the impending doom falling from the sky, I got a chance to hear the Butch Davis interview with 620AM’s Sports Talk.  Well… I say interview, but that implies one individual is asking questions and someone else is answering.  From what I heard, the totality of Davis’ responses was “I dunno”.  I swear, how an individual with the intelligence of Davis makes it to a place that reveres itself as UNC does is beyond me.  Then again, this is the same school that decided to make another famous moron their poster-child.

Unbelievable.  But I digress…

So Butch Davis was asked about the recent exposure of credit card records from Austin and Balmer and if he thought that the head coach of the team should be aware of who is giving money to his players for trips.

‘How can I know what credit cards the kids use?  I don’t know what credit cards you use.  You don’t know what credit cards I use.  Plus, I don’t even know if the claims are true or not.’ (Paraphrase)

Butch…. *sigh*… let me see if I can’t explain this to you.  You are the coach of a “major” D-1A football program at a highly public university.  Part of that job description is that you need to have a general idea of where your players are and what they are up to.  From the records released, Austin took time off to head off to Cali-Cali from March 7th to March 14th of last year.  This means that for 7 days, Davis didn’t know where one of this most highly acclaimed recruits was, if he was training, if he was doing anything illegal, or if he was studying.

“But NCStatePride, they were on Spring Break.”  You have got to be kidding me, token Carolina fan!  A head coach of a D-1A program shouldn’t be concerned about where his star defensive players are on Spring Break?  I tell you what;  We’ll give Butch a pass on that question and go on to his second gaff.  Davis was asked about whether the reputation of Blake or his history/personal connections were known before he accepted a position at UNC.

”Carolina does an extensive background check of every coach.  They do it for all of our employees and coaches.  They did it for me, they did it for everyone.’ (Paraphrase)

Butch you are so #%$^ing dumb.  The question was “shouldn’t you have been aware of some of the previous histories and relationships of your assistance coaches”, specifically talking about Blake’s connections to Wichard that recently broke.  So your response to “shouldn’t you have been aware” is basically that you were aware of Blake’s history?

Ladies and gentlemen, you heard it from the horse’s mouth: Davis knew exactly what was going on and he just… I suppose… didn’t care.  As the first caller stated “Davis sounds like a walking dead man and I think he knows it.”

Most infuriating of Butch Davis’ comments is that he shouldn’t “have” to know what’s going on.  He feels students have private lives and… hey… he can’t be responsible for what they do in their private lives.  News flash, Butch: the subject of ‘their private lives’ is your livelihood!  If they are misbehaving, legally or ethically, it will turn on you in a flash.  Maybe he became arrogant because of the UNC PR shield that you are given as a Carolina “official”.  Either way, Butch Davis’ excuse that ‘he doesn’t know what’s going on’ and ‘this is completely not his responsibility’ is getting petty and tiresome.

The fact that Butch Davis is not being immediately dismissed is beyond me.

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UPDATE
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3:00PM 9/30/2010

Recently, Carolina AD Baddour released a statement regarding the financial records proving a connection between Blake and Wichard:

“We became aware of some of the information through the NCAA investigation when John Blake was interviewed on Aug. 31. But financial transactions in and of themselves don’t establish a violation, and at that time we did not have enough information to dismiss him with cause.

“Nevertheless, we weren’t comfortable with what we learned. That, combined with the distraction that Coach Blake was becoming to the football program, led us to the conclusion that it was not in our best interest for him to continue to bepart of our program. He offered to resign, and we agreed to terms on Sept. 5.”

So it appears Baddour disagrees with Butch Davis.  According to Davis, “I am not my brother’s keeper.”  Davis basically states in his interview earlier today that the university does everything they can do to flush out the rift-raft.  What I read out of Baddour’s release is that they knew there were large sums of money being transferred between Blake and Wichard… they just didn’t think that proved anything.  What a load.  From one Carolina official you get a response of “we’ve done all we can do and if we had any way of knowing what people do in their private lives, we might take action.”  What you have from Baddour is “we know what goes on in their private lives, we just didn’t think it meant anything bad was going on.”

As some of the commenters have stated, simply because a rule isn’t broken doesn’t mean the spirit of the rule isn’t being broken.  If Baddour saw large sums of money being passed between an agent and an assistant head coach, and if integrity was really a top priority, he would have quickly dismissed the assistant head coach and issued a public statement that they are attempting to flush out the corruption in their program as quickly as possible.  Instead, Baddour chose the “Carolina Way” which is to stonewall the public, protect their ‘homers’ as much as possible, and pray the problem goes away.

About NCStatePride

***ABOUT THE AUTHOR: NCStatePride has been writing for StateFansNation.com since 2010 and is a 2009 graduate of the College of Engineering.

UNC Scandal

55 Responses to Davis on 620AM: ‘How Should I Know?!’ [3:00P UPDATE]

  1. txpack 09/30/2010 at 11:49 AM #

    Great job! Coach.

    You spin the way exactly like “The Carolina Way”!!

  2. lsutton5144 09/30/2010 at 11:51 AM #

    There is no way any respectable school at any level, including high school, would keep him as a coach. How could he not know of Blake’s reputation? Everybody else did!

  3. Prowling Woofie 09/30/2010 at 11:52 AM #

    Keep sticking a mic in his mug –

  4. Old MacDonald 09/30/2010 at 11:53 AM #

    They should have self-nuked the football program from space back in August. Now they have made it 100 times worse for themselves.

  5. Wpack222 09/30/2010 at 11:55 AM #

    Perhaps Butch should get a lesson from our old Ratpack friend Joey Bishop…

  6. NCStatePride 09/30/2010 at 11:59 AM #

    ^Agreed. A lot of people have applauded Carolina’s admin for playing this thing as right as they could have, Carolina and non-Carolina fans included. Obviously, this is only a valid statement if your assumption is that no one in the administration knew any of this was going on. As the article is titled… “How Should I Know?!”

  7. ppack3 09/30/2010 at 12:00 PM #

    But, but, Dickie supports Butchie, 100%. Doesn’t that count for something?

  8. wolfbuff 09/30/2010 at 12:00 PM #

    “The fact that Butch Davis is not being immediately dismissed is beyond me.”

    Let it play out. He’ll be gone. You don’t just go firing a coach with a guaranteed $2M+ contract without a solid case, securing the payoff funding, etc. If they keep him long enough, he may just dig his own grave, saving the administration the shovel time.

  9. primacyone 09/30/2010 at 12:01 PM #

    You know dang well recruits were getting paid to go to UNC . . . .

    Somebody is going to pop up with some proof of that pretty soon.

  10. ppack3 09/30/2010 at 12:03 PM #

    “They should have self-nuked the football program from space back in August. Now they have made it 100 times worse for themselves.” – OldMacDonald

    The longer they keep Butch, the more the NCAA is going to come down on them. They certainly should’ve cut bait in August, but for whatever reasons (presumable self-benefiting), they didn’t. That’ll only hurt them in the long run.

  11. bluelena69 09/30/2010 at 12:05 PM #

    My father was a very successful coach (he has a number of ACC championship watches and rings) and I can assure you that he deemed it his responsibility to know where his athletes were and he assumed responsibility for their actions at all times. And he was only a coach of non- revenue sports, albeit one with large teams i.e. he was not compensated nearly as well as Old Butchie, and in this age of deniability, we are just seeing more of what we see out of bankers and other overpaid swine.

    I guess the more you make, the less willing one is to assume responsibility for what their job entails. He knew what was going on or else he was failing miserably to maintain control that his stratospheric salary would dictate. I remember occasions when I was a young child where I went with my father to retrieve bongs out of his athletes’ rooms or when he had to go out in the middle of night to get kids out of jail…

  12. NCStatePride 09/30/2010 at 12:07 PM #

    I guess my point, wolfbluff, is that the administration knew something about all this. At some level, someone knew something. Carolina as a more than solid case that Butch Davis is, at best, completely unaware of his responsibilities as a head coach and what he “should” and “should not” know. They could have fired him back in August for not keeping better tabs of his players and saved face just fine. I bet TOB, or his coaching staff, know what each player was vaguely up to during spring break. It’s just common sense!

  13. whitey1 09/30/2010 at 12:08 PM #

    I did like his comment on “how this is a college athletics problem (agent/runner/etc.) and is going on everywhere” – that arguement is like getting caught underage drinking and saying everyone is doing it…? You are accountable for your actions not others – you got caught (not a hand in the cookie jar, but your head got stuck in it), now it is time to suffer the ramifications of these actions.

  14. bigdudenc 09/30/2010 at 12:11 PM #

    IMO Butch, Dickie, Thorpe are just playing the “I didn’t know,” card for their next job interview. They all know they are toast, esp. Butch and Dickie. If you listened to Dickie yesterday and Butch today you can hear the apathy. They must keep up the BS or they will never be hired again, or won’t get their carolina blue parachute. That just made me laugh, realizing how awful it must have been to write Blake that final check. It’s like paying the guy that just robbed your house.

  15. JeremyH 09/30/2010 at 12:49 PM #

    Butch Davis is a victim.
    He is a victim of the System.
    This system is otherwise referred to as `The Carolina Way’.

  16. choppack1 09/30/2010 at 12:50 PM #

    The potential money tie between Blake and the agent is where this is going to get dicey.

    Of course, our first hint that this was there was when the question was asked to Blake’s attorney – “Was he paid by the agent” – and the response was, “That’s a complicated question.”

    So now – the question becomes – when did Baddour, Davis and Thorp find out about this? Has the NCAA given them this info or is this something new.

    Depending on whom you believe, this is just the tip of the iceberg. If it is, UNC football is the Titanic.

  17. Ismael 09/30/2010 at 12:51 PM #

    u left out the new measures taken to monitor players: “Sign Out Sheets”

  18. NCStatePride 09/30/2010 at 1:02 PM #

    ^I must have missed that part. Listening to Davis try to suggest ideas for fixing the football program is similar to listening to a bunch of high schoolers talk about how to save their Latin club from disbanding due to budget cuts. You get these wildly ineffective, poorly thought-out, and naive concepts like “sign-out sheets” and “make them promise to be good”. I said it before and I’ll say it again… what a freaking moron.

  19. Wolfman300 09/30/2010 at 1:03 PM #

    Scott Van Pelt show discussing UNX mess – Bruce Feldman calling it brutal – doesn’t see how Butch can survive – calling Blake a runner that was Butch’s right hand man.

  20. lsutton5144 09/30/2010 at 1:03 PM #

    Sign out sheet is worthless if you don’t want someone to know where you are going. Or if you can’t spell or write your name.

  21. GAWolf 09/30/2010 at 1:08 PM #

    ^Which apparently even as recent as Torbush UNC football used such signout sheets. Davis acted like this was something from the leather helmet days in the interview. That’s crap. Coaches who WANT to know what their players are doing find ways to know. But if they are likely up to no good and one might not want to know, that’s workable too.

  22. Gowolves 09/30/2010 at 1:11 PM #

    I would bet the farm right now they are discussing the buy out terms with Butchie’s agent. It will be annouced on Monday after they beat ECU. That is just a gut feeling. Or wishful thinking. Either way it will happen before the season ends.

  23. Prowling Woofie 09/30/2010 at 1:19 PM #

    ^^^^ I hope the media never loses sight of the fact that Blake was ASSOCIATE HEAD COACH and HEAD OF RECRUITING. He wasn’t merely a position coach…

    And how can they think that none of the guys currently on the field – recruited by this same dirty coach – never received any improper benefits ?

    Perhaps they didn’t go to Miami or Vegas, or have tutors write their papers, but if they were recruited and signed by a guy that breaks the rules, how minute are the chances they were recruited cleanly ?

  24. Rochester 09/30/2010 at 1:22 PM #

    What about ankle bracelets? Some of them might as well get used to wearing them anyway.

  25. Homeboy 09/30/2010 at 1:24 PM #

    pass the Butchie on the left hand side…

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