11am Update: Durham Herald Sun tweeted the following 11 minutes ago:
#UNC football spokesman Kevin Best said Kendric Burney’s case still hasn’t been resolved
1pm Update: The News & Observer just posted this:
Burney’s case not resolved
North Carolina cornerback Kendric Burney has not been cleared for Saturday’s game at Miami, a team spokesman said this morning.
The NCAA suspended Burney, an All-ACC cornerback, six games for receiving agent-related benefits. He was scheduled to return on Saturday but before UNC’s win at Virginia on Oct. 16, the school announced Burney still had “unresolved issues” related to the ongoing NCAA investigation.“His case is not resolved,” UNC spokesman Kevin Best said today.
Multiple media outlets have reported that Burney has been cleared by the school’s honor court and will play on Saturday.
4:00 pm update
From the sports editor of the DTH:
jjones9 Jonathan Jones
Kevin Best tells me that Burney will not be adding a class this late in the semester. He wants to end the rumors. Issue is still unresolved
8:30 update
Does anyone wonder what may have led UNC away from allowing Burney to add this class mid-semester? Here is what how a UNC blog broke down today’s events:
So what is happening here? Obviously if Burney needs to add a class it means the honor court gave him a failing grade in a previous one. That means he is short the number of hours he needs to meet certain NCAA academic requirements to be eligible to play football.
At this point in the semester I do not think it is possible to add a class, that is something only UNC can fully answer. One question to ask if why did Burney conclude adding a class was possible if it wasn’t? Is it possible Burney prematurely telling people upset the apple cart and outed what was supposed to be a private process by which UNC and the NCAA work on an agreement to get Burney on the field? If so, Burney’s exuberance might be his undoing. Given the media scrutiny I can see how resolving the issue in such a way that allows Burney to play forces UNC to account for the process. Whereas if Burney goes to the honor court, is found guilty, received an F then UNC discusses it with the NCAA and makes an arrangement with them for Burney to play then all UNC has to do is put out a press release saying Burney is clear while using privacy laws as a means of not talking about how the sausage is made.
If I had to guess, I would say that this has become a bit of a PR issue which might make it difficult for UNC to get Burney on the field.
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Originally posted:
I have said you just can’t make this stuff up in regards to the ongoing scandal in Chapel Hill several times already and the latest news regarding Kendrick Burney continues along that same theme.
Burney went before the Honor Court Monday to hear his case regarding the NCAA investigation into academic fraud. Burney told NewsChannel 12 that if he picks up a class Tuesday morning, he will be allowed to play Saturday at Miami….
….But Burney told us that if he picks up this class, he should be able to play in his first game of the year this weekend.
Updated
-According to the NCAA, a student-athlete only has to enroll in 12 hours to compete except when a student is in his final semester. So let’s speculate on what might be happening with Burney. Let’s say a student-athlete only needs 3 hours to graduate. The NCAA allows that student-athlete to take 3 hours and play football in his final semester. Now let’s say that the same student-athlete all of sudden finds himself in front of the honor court and gets charged with academic fraud causing a failing grade in a previous class. All of a sudden, the player would be ineligible by NCAA rules because they would need to be taking 6 hours.
So what does the university do? They ask a professor on campus to throw academic integrity aside to allow the student-athlete, who committed academic fraud, to enroll in their class 6 weeks after the official deadline of August 30th. If the permission is granted, then the student-athlete would be eligible and can play football this coming weekend. The Carolina Way in a nutshell.
How can a professor grant that permission knowing a kid who was just found guilty of academic fraud, only took the bare minimum needed to graduate at the beginning of the semester(what is the kid doing with the rest of his time in Chapel Hill?), but now is desperate to enroll in your class just so he can play football?
An even better question is how a university that supposedly values integrity and academics first could even put a professor in a position to have to make that decision? Especially when the student-athlete involved has already embarrassed the university by accepting illegal benefits and committing academic fraud?
At some point, one would think somebody in Chapel Hill would stand up and do what is right.
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Regardless of what we learn, every twist and turn of this story becomes a more clear indication that the “Carolina Way” is clearly the way of doing anything to get/keep kids who break the rules eligible and on the field. We are yet to find a single instance in this sordid affair where UNC has voluntarily mandated a punishment to one of these kids that is beyond the bounds of what the NCAA required, would have required, or wasn’t tied to keeping ineligible players off the field to attempt to avoid the future vacating of wins.
Not once has there just been discipline for the sake of discipline. Not once has there been a suspension/expulsion because a kid did wrong and the Athletics Department chose to invoke some kind of LEADERSHIP in disciplining a kid for his decisions.
“There have been multiple issues [with Burney],” UNC athletic director Dick Baddour said Saturday at Scott Stadium. “We’ve been working on them for some time. We had hoped that all of those issues would be resolved by this time but that hasn’t happened unfortunately.
“It is possible that it will be resolved by the Miami game. It’s possible that it will be resolved favorably, and it’s possible that it will not be resolved favorably.”
How does one ultimately ‘resolve’ things that are blatantly wrong? Either the kid really screwed up with ‘multiple issues’ or he didn’t.
By Baddour’s own admission, Burney has had ‘multiple issues’. Instead of just putting down their foot and saying, “Enough is enough”…the administrators at UNC continue to show us the true “Carolina Way” — ‘no matter how much you screw up, we will NOT discipline you more than the NCAA might require. We don’t have standards that are any different than the bare minimum. We will use all of the resources of the department to find ways to help support student-athletes that break multiple rules across different issues – agents, academics, improper benefits, others?’
There is more about this tangential conversation here.
