Dan Kane (N&O): Questions Linger

Of all folks, it’s the N&O keeping the heat on The Flagship.

Many of us keep rightly pointing out that The Flagship Spin Machine is distancing the basketball program from this mess, making sure to always call it “football class.” Our new friend Dan Kane questions this and highlights several other key questions that remain unanswered (News & Observer):

Is this about basketball?

UNC-CH men’s basketball coach Roy Williams said Thursday that the academic fraud case is not a basketball issue. “I’m worried about it from a university issue, but not from a basketball issue,” he said.

Some have cited the low percentage of basketball players enrolling in the 54 classes that university officials say showed little or no instruction. Three percent, or 23 enrollments, does seem small. But it doesn’t take many athletes to field a basketball team – five on the floor plus several backups. If Williams fielded a new team each of the four years of the period under review, 23 enrollments could equal one in three players taking a suspect class.

Furthermore, the records show that in two cases a basketball player was the sole enrollee in a class. In another, a basketball player was one of two enrollees. Two of those three classes were Swahili language courses, and are among nine classes in which officials can’t identify who created them and provided some kind of assignment.

Put another way, here are two language classes in which students would be expected to develop their speaking skills that never met. And they had no more than two students enrolled. How were they expected to practice speaking the language?

So, ol’ Roy Williams himself see this as a “university issue.” Wouldn’t this naturally imply then that it’s an “institutional issue?”