The University of North Carolina has been involved in an ongoing investigation into their academic irregularities, and a UNC official confirmed Monday that the university has received an amended notice of allegations from the NCAA in connection to this allegation.
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North Carolina is still being charged with violating the “NCAA Principle of Institutional Control and Responsibility” along with four other Level 1 violations, the most severe in the NCAA’s new four-tiered system.
Multiple reports announce the University of North Carolina has received new allegations into their already long-running investigation.
One of the key differences between the amended notice and the original is that in the original, UNC faced a broad charge of impermissible benefits associated with the suspect AFAM courses that are at the heart of the case.
Cunningham clarified that the amended NOA replaces the original notice and is not an add-on document.
While the wording of the amended Notice of Allegations suggests that women’s basketball will be the sport hit hardest by committee on infractions, it doesn’t guarantee that football, men’s basketball and the rest of the athletic department will get away with just a wrist slap. After UNC responds to the notice, the NCAA has 60 days to respond to the response. It also included violations by a women’s basketball adviser for providing improper assistance on research papers.
Athletic director Bubba Cunningham wouldn’t say why the changes were made nor discuss possible sanctions. The second finding related to potential recruiting violations by the men’s soccer program over the past two years. She is cited 18 times in the first pages of the NOA.
A 2014 investigation by former U.S. Justice Department official Kenneth Wainstein estimated more than 3,100 students were affected between 1993 and 2011, with athletes making up roughly half the enrollments in problem African and Afro-American Studies courses. There also have been three lawsuits filed by ex-UNC athletes.
Cunningham said while the university awaits any potential sanctions from the NCAA, he thinks the university has already suffered in some ways due to the length of the investigation.
Also, Julius Nyang’oro, the former chair of the African- and Afro-American Studies department, and Debby Crowder, a former administrative assistant in the department, were charged with unethical conduct in the first NOA.
The new NOA lists the same number of level one violations – five – as the older one. The new NOA, though, is not an end point as much as it is a new beginning to a case that still has several steps to go before a resolution is reached.
That language could have given the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions license to identify many individual athletes and teams that used players who would have been otherwise ineligible; instead, after this eight-month delay, that phrasing is limited to Jan Boxill and the women’s basketball team. North Carolina would then have an opportunity to appeal that ruling.
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Now, the university is likely to face punishment only as an institution – except for the women’s basketball program, which has been positioned to bear the full brunt of the NCAA’s wrath, ever so conveniently.
