Rumblings from the Twitter-verse: NCAA preparing UNC’s letter of inquiry, "Scope of investigation has slowed down the process"

I am very new to the whole Twitter thing, so I am not entirely clear how you tell who is talking and who is asking questions of someone else, but there  is some VERY interesting stuff on Charles Robinson’s Twitter page this afternoon.  Alert readers will remember that Robinson is with Yahoo Sports and has been out in front of the scandals since the beginning.  He has proven to be very reliable with information.

The most pertinent Twitter entries from his page are:

Want to clear something up about what I said Monday on @DavidGlennShow. NCAA has only sent letters to UNC players, not school. about 2 hours ago via web

and

NCAA is absolutely preparing letter of inquiry for UNC. Scope of investigation has slowed down process. But it is coming. @DavidGlennShow about 2 hours ago via web

Uh-oh.  That last one sounds particularly “not good” for our pals over in Chapel Hill.

Also, for those of you keeping track the recruiting fallout from the scandals, added to the problems we told you about last week in this entry, apparently two additional players who had comitted to UNC-CH  are now listed as “soft verbals,” whatever that means.  You can check that out here.

Letters of Inquiry

There are a couple of links from the NCAA’s website that are worth looking at:

NCAA Glossary of Terms

Brief Discussion on the Enforcement Process

As is often the case, the NCAA manages to contradict itself in just a few sentences:

Letter of Inquiry: When the enforcement staff begins an investigation, they send a letter of inquiry to the president or chancellor. The purpose of this notice is to inform school leadership the enforcement staff will be investigating possible NCAA violations at their school. The alleged facts of the case are also presented and other details are provided including an approximate time frame of the investigation.

I’m not sure how you are supposed to provide the alleged facts of the case at the beginning of an investigation.   But in any case, the chances of a school having five players ruled permanently ineligible (well, technically four plus our buddy Marvin) and the school somehow NOT come under investigation defies belief….and that’s not even including the flurry caused by Blake’s dealings with agents and illegal contact with athletes at other schools.