WOW! When they don’t have the value of controlling the questions and the media you never know what honesty you are going to get.
Larry Fedora talking about his players. "I couldn’t tell you what one guy’s major is." Don't think that's a good recruiting pitch to parents
— Jeff Gravley (@jgravleyWRAL) October 23, 2014
Now that Coach Fedora is being honest with everyone, I wonder how these revelations match what he tells mothers and fathers of top recruits when he tells them that he will be looking after their children as if they are his own?
Now…don’t forget….as we have been chronicling for you and will continue to chronicle for you, the local and national media and the UNC Board of Governors set a VERY CLEAR standard some 20+ years ago that head coaches in the North Carolina system are EXPECTED to know the ins and outs of the education of their kids. And, they are to be held accountable by means of being removed from their position if the student-athletes within their program find ways to skirt the ‘spirit’ of education.
Of course, those standards only applied to Jim Valvano at a time when he had as many National Championships as Dean Smith. They OBVIOUSLY have NO PLACE applying to UNC-CHeats coaches of any kind.
The president of North Carolina’s public university system today asked Jim Valvano to resign as athletic director at North Carolina State because an investigation of the school’s basketball program had revealed extensive academic abuses that broke “the spirit, not the letter of the law.”
[snip]
Spangler’s report faulted Valvano for failure to provide adequate oversight of players’ academic progress and for encouraging course loads designed to maintain athletic eligibility rather than to form ”a coherent program of study.” Valvano was further criticized for recruiting players who had no reasonable expectation of graduation.
In March of 1990, the Charlotte Observer‘s Tom Sorensen eloquently penned the drum beat of the day when he put a stake in the ground that Jim Valvano should be removed as NC State’s head coach:
Being a coach is more than finding players and pointing them toward the proper basket. Being a coach is caring enough to know what is going on.
I wondering what being a coach is all about today and why Sorensen and the media’s views on the topic are so different (or unstated) today? I mean, evidently NO UNC Coaches over the last twenty years should have known that their players were “driving loaned cars, receiving free parking, not attending classes, hanging with agents and runners, buying cheesecake for everybody.” (as quoted from a Pack Pride poster).
I’m also curious…if Larry Fedora doesn’t even know the majors of his players, then how can he remotely be recruiting players who had a reasonable expectation of graduation? That behavior was enough to destroy Jim Valvano. But, in Chapel Hill it has been the recipe for success since…well…since almost the very day that the UNC-Chapel Hill controlled Board of Governors found a way to get rid of Jim Valvano. Gee, what a coincidence.
#NeverForgetJimmyV
