Chapter
Ten
The
basketball program’s ties to AFAM; Wayne Walden
Following the discovery of information contained within
Julius Peppers’ transcript, several realizations began to set in: the academic
fraud had apparently been going on at UNC for an extended time, and the
school’s storied basketball program had likely been a main beneficiary of the
impermissible transgressions. Several
very candid and critical news articles along those lines were written in the
days following the uncovering of the transcript. In addition, there were numerous older
articles that when re-examined and viewed under this new umbrella of knowledge,
showed some amazing coincidences that would provide further damage to UNC’s
academic/athletic past. By way of those
older articles, even more connections between the AFAM department and people
within the basketball program would be shown.
The first article to directly call out UNC basketball
appeared on August 14, 2012, just two days after Peppers’ transcript was
revealed. The article, penned by
national columnist Gregg Doyel, was featured on the CBSsports.com website. He raised many bold questions of the program,
wondered how so many abnormalities could have been overlooked for so long by
both UNC and the NCAA, and briefly compared the school to others that had
committed academic fraud.
“It’s astounding,” Doyel wrote, “how this academic
scandal could go on for so many years and help so many UNC athletes without
being stopped. Where was North
Carolina’s leadership in all of this?
Where was the UNC president, the athletics director, the coaches for football
and – yes – basketball? Where was the
NCAA?” He also asked where the media
(himself included) had been for not noticing any potential problems
earlier. He owned up to his own
oversight: “(I was) in disbelief that
what seemed to be happening at North Carolina actually was happening. This was an indictment of UNC academics, and
that didn’t jibe with me, maybe because I didn’t want it to jibe. … I didn’t want to believe this school… could
be so shameful.”
When mentioning that it was individuals from a rival
school’s fan site that discovered the transcript, he said it added humiliation
to the episode, but not just for the sake of a rivalry. “(It is) humiliating also because it
underscores just how ignorant North Carolina wanted to be. UNC officials didn’t want to know what was
happening, so they stuck their heads in the dirt – and it just got worse. How bad?
Maybe the ugliest academic scandal in NCAA history. This one is worse than what happened in 2007
at Florida State. I mean, it’s not even
close. Florida State had some numbers
that looked bad – 61 athletes from 10 different teams – but this UNC scandal
dwarfs it. FSU had 61 tainted players,
almost all from the same class. North
Carolina has at least 54 classes.” The
figure Doyel used of 54 classes, of course, was only from the 2007-2011 review
– and did not include others that were likely fraudulent beginning with the
years of the Peppers transcript, and perhaps even earlier. Indeed, unbeknownst to him, the number of
classes would exponentially grow in the future as more data would be revealed.
Doyel continued with that line of thinking: “How many athletes were given free grades
from the Department of African and Afro-American Studies? We don’t know. UNC never wanted to find out, but the school
has no choice now. The school mustered a
halfhearted search for the truth earlier this year when it found those 54
tainted classes, but its search went back only to 2007. Despite efforts from the Raleigh News and Observer that suggested
otherwise, the school held firm that the academic fraud started in 2007.”
Once the transcript from 2001 was uncovered, he said,
everything changed. “We have evidence
not only of grades being given to athletes for at least a decade – but also
that UNC academic support staff steered athletes to those classes. This can’t be dismissed as the rogue actions
of a man named Julius Nyang’oro, the embattled former head of the Department of
African and Afro-American Studies. If it
was just him, well, that could be explained away to a certain extent. The school would be vulnerable to NCAA sanctions,
but one man running amok? That’s not
horrible.”
Doyel then laid out the alternative to a Nyang’oro-only
setup, one which was becoming increasingly more likely given all the data that
was emerging from the UNC scandal. “So
what actually happened at North Carolina?
Academic advisers steering athletes to Nyang’oro’s department. Athletes staying eligible by getting grades
in some classes that didn’t even exist.
Athletes who played football and men’s basketball. Did the coaches know? Well, ask yourself this: Are we to believe that academic advisers were
steering famous athletes to bogus classes behind the backs of the millionaire
coaches who recruited, coached and needed
those athletes to remain eligible?”
Doyel went on to give more numerical figures, and spell
out more likely conclusions. “Answers
are coming, but we already know this:
The scandal spanned the decade from 2001-11. Know what happened that decade? The UNC men’s basketball team played in three
Final Fours. It won national titles in
2005 and 2009. Did any players on those
NCAA championship teams attend bogus classes?
According to the News and Observer,
almost 67 percent of the students in those 54 classes were athletes. Most played football, but the newspaper
reported that UNC records showed ‘basketball players had also enrolled. In two classes, the sole enrollee was a
basketball player.’”
Doyel then returned to the topic of Florida State, a
school which had recently been punished for academic improprieties. “See, this is so much worse than what
happened at Florida State – and Florida State vacated two seasons of saintly
Bobby Bowden’s victories, suffered scholarship restrictions and received four
years of probation. What happens to
North Carolina? Well, that depends. First, the NCAA has to show it cares. Incredibly, to date, the NCAA has not. Trained NCAA investigators missed the very
stuff that is seeping out now, including the transcript discovered by a single
N.C. State fan. The NCAA poked around,
found some stuff, but didn’t find this.
(They) didn’t find 54 bogus classes from 2007-11, or the unknown number
of classes dating to 2001, filled mostly by UNC athletes. The NCAA hasn’t uttered a peep in recent days
about these new allegations, either.
Neither has the school. Not Roy
Williams. Not anybody.”
Doyel closed his article with what would appear to be the
obvious next steps to be taken – assuming such steps were dictated by morals,
ethics, and rules. The first would have
been by the NCAA, and the next by the school:
“It’s time for the NCAA to start digging. In the meantime, North Carolina should get a
head start on some of its own chores.
For starters? There are some
banners at the Smith Center that need to come down.”
*
* *
Another scathing yet insightful article appeared by
national writer Pat Forde on August 17, 2012.
Forde was a respected senior writer for Yahoo! Sports. He began his
piece by referencing the recent sanctions that the NCAA had given to Penn State
University, and voiced questions as to whether that governing body would
continue to show a strong policy of judgment with regards to UNC.
“After the NCAA circumvented its own crime-and-punishment
process and blew up Penn State last month,” Forde wrote, “we all wondered how
long it would take for a follow-up test case to measure the willingness of the
‘new NCAA’ to flex its precedent-setting muscles again. Was the Penn State case a sign of a new era
in policing of athletic programs gone bad, or an isolated blip brought on by a
school’s unique abdication of morals and responsibilities? Lo and behold, we have the festering scandal
at North Carolina to give us a quick answer”.
“As the Raleigh News
& Observer and North Carolina State message-board vigilantes continue
to go where UNC’s timorous administration wouldn’t in plumbing the depths of
the Tar Heels’ academic mess,” Forde continued, “the situation demands a signal
from NCAA president Mark Emmert. Will he
and the NCAA executive committee cowboy up again? Will they circumvent the rules manual and due
process and go after Carolina on the basis of general principle, a la Penn
State?”
Forde then highlighted some of Penn State’s sanctions: a
four-year bowl ban, $60 million fine, scholarship cuts, and more than 100
vacated victories. All, he noted,
without the benefit of an NCAA investigation or infractions hearing. Penn State had, however, been very
forthcoming with its sharing of information – inviting Louis Freeh and his law
firm, Freeh Sporkin & Sullivan LLP, onto campus. Freeh was a former Director of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, a native of New Jersey, and did not have any
connections to Penn State or its administration. He was given full access to all of the
school’s past documents, emails, and records.
His eventual findings would prompt the NCAA – and its president Mark
Emmert – to hand down the heavy sanctions against Penn State.
Included in Forde’s August 17 article were some of
Emmert’s quotes following the penalization of Penn State several months
earlier: “While there’s been much
speculation about whether this fits this specific bylaw or that specific
bylaw,” Emmert had said, “it certainly hits the fundamental values of what
athletics are supposed to be doing in the context of higher education. One of the grave dangers stemming from our
love of sports is the sports themselves can become too big to fail and too big
to even challenge. The result can be an
erosion of academic values that are replaced by hero worship and winning at all
costs.” Forde pointed out that it seemed
pretty clear there was an erosion of academic values at North Carolina, as well
as a situation that threatened the fundamental value of what athletics were
supposed to be doing in the context of higher education – situations taking
place that in fact mirrored Emmert’s words exactly.
Forde wrote, “The more we learn, the more it seems UNC
has made a mockery of its ballyhooed academic mission for a long time in order
to gain competitive advantage in football and men’s basketball. With the introduction of what apparently is
former two-sport star Julius Peppers’ transcript into the public forum, it
seems reasonable to assume that Carolina has been skating athletes through the
African and Afro-America Studies department in order to maintain eligibility
for more than a decade.”
Forde said the problem wasn’t isolated to one coach, one
sport, or one professor. Instead, it was
an institutional issue, “and that conjures one of those NCAA catch phrases that
translate to big trouble: lack of institutional control.” However, despite the overwhelming abundance
of evidence that had already surfaced in 2012 even prior to the Peppers
revelation, NCAA enforcement had for some reason shown no interest in returning
to Chapel Hill and reopening its investigation.
This was where one of UNC’s main public-relations
“message points” apparently came into play.
According to Forde’s article, UNC said the NCAA’s reasoning for staying
away had been that the academic problems uncovered in the initial AFAM review
were an institutional issue and not strict athletic rules violations. As school officials had made sure to state
numerous times in the media over the previous several months, both athletes and
non-athletes had taken the fraudulent classes, and thus it was the school’s
opinion that the improprieties fell outside the NCAA’s realm of
jurisdiction. This, despite the fact
that the majority of students in the classes were athletes, and that numerous
players on the school’s basketball and football teams had chosen AFAM as their
major over the past two decades. Also,
Forde pointed out another note of incomprehensible hypocrisy: “And as much as
the NCAA is hands-on with transcripts and grades of athletes coming out of high
school,” he wrote, “it is notably (and nonsensically) hands-off with
transcripts and grades of athletes in college.”
Forde then returned his argument to the Penn State
case. He said that there was nothing
about what happened at that school that fit “neatly” into the NCAA rules
enforcement, yet the association felt that Penn State had placed sports ahead
of the university itself, so the governing body acted. Forde asked if Emmert and the NCAA executive
committee would penalize another program gone wrong (UNC) without a cut-and-dried
bylaw violation (though it had become abundantly clear that fraud had occurred
which directly benefited athletes). Or,
had the NCAA simply penalized Penn State as part of a P.R. move to “appease the
outraged and show that the NCAA could hit a bloated target at point-blank
range?”
Forde made it very plain that he did not consider the crimes at North Carolina to be the same as the
human atrocities at Penn State, a point that was also stressed in this book’s
introduction. Having made that point
clear, he would then go on to say, “In terms of what’s objectionable to the
NCAA – alleged systematic academic fraud over a decade or more – that (is what)
strikes at the core of the entire athletic franchise. And now that a ‘Damn the Rulebook, Do What’s
Right’ precedent has been established, is North Carolina’s sad academic scandal
a logical second act for the Emmert Posse?
If not, I’d say the NCAA has some explaining to do.”
Forde closed his article by referencing Josephine Potuto,
a former member and chairwoman on the NCAA Committee on Infractions who was at
the time the NCAA faculty athletic representative at Nebraska. She had told Yahoo! Sports in July of 2012 that she was concerned about the
precedent the Penn State ruling had set for the NCAA to jump outside its
standard operating procedures. She said
that the NCAA would have to explain itself every time it chose not to get
involved in an athletic issue on campus that was not directly related to NCAA
bylaws. At the very least, UNC had just
provided such an issue. Furthermore,
depending on whether Emmert and his group chose to dig further into the
school’s blatant academic transgressions, issues that were much more
clearly-defined (in terms of NCAA bylaws) could await. As Gregg Doyel had said in his previous news
piece, however, the NCAA first had to show that it cared.
*
* *
USA Today
printed an article on August 16, 2012, that in part recounted a radio
appearance that UNC basketball coach Roy Williams had made earlier that
day. Williams made some puzzling remarks
about the past that perhaps unintentionally alluded to issues and offered clues
to certain patterns within the men’s basketball program. Williams graduated from UNC, had been a
longtime assistant to Dean Smith before leaving to be the head coach at Kansas,
and then returned to coach his alma mater in 2003. He had since gone on to win two national
titles at the school, in 2005 and 2009. “You
know,” Williams said, “I’m bothered by a lot of stuff. I’m bothered by some sensationalism going
on. I’m bothered by problems that we have. I’m bothered by mistakes that we have
made. But you know, I think in my
opinion it’s best for me to keep my mouth shut and let our administrative
people take care of it.” Even while
referencing possible “mistakes” that had been made, Williams still defended his
teams’ academic records at both Kansas and UNC.
His further comments, however, would continue to refer to issues
and problems. “I don’t think you can put your head in the
sand and say, ‘oh we’re all right – it’s just people making things up.’ I’m not saying that. There’s been some mistakes made, and there’s
been some serious mistakes.” A closer look at earlier stories could
possibly point to the source of those references, references which may have
even been a Freudian slip of sorts.
*
* *
An article appeared on indystar.com, the website of The
Indianapolis Star newspaper, on April 2, 2010, several years prior to the
discovery of UNC’s academic fraud. The
title was “They got game, but do NCAA players graduate?” Its topic dealt with some of the top men’s
basketball programs and players – and how those players performed in the
classroom. In retrospect, it would end
up giving some startling insight into UNC and its AFAM department. It painted a much clearer picture as to the
extent the department may have impermissibly benefitted athletes in the
past.
According to the article, The Indianapolis Star newspaper had used public records requests
and spent four months collecting data and analyzing graduation rates to look at
how athletes who played in the men’s basketball Final Four from 1991 to 2007
fared in the classroom. The newspaper
had obtained results for 357 athletes who played at least one minute in a Final
Four semifinal or championship game for a taxpayer-funded public university. UNC fell under that university distinction,
and had furthermore advanced to the Final Four nine different times during the
years covered – winning the national title on three of those occasions. Coincidence or not, the start of that
successful time period which included nine Final Four trips and three national
titles coincided almost exactly with Julius Nyang’oro being appointed as the
chairman of UNC’s AFAM department in 1992.
The article mentioned the term “clustering,” which
referred to a high percentage of teammates receiving the same degree. The school it used as the most glaring
example was UNC, pointing out that of its basketball graduates, Communications
and African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) stood out as the two majors of
choice. In fact, from the UNC team that
won the 2005 national title, there were seven Tar Heels who had the same major,
which was AFAM. That list included stars
Sean May, Jackie Manuel, David Noel, Jawad Williams, Melvin Scott, Reyshawn
Terry, and Marvin Williams. Sean May,
who was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player in 2005 and would go on
to play in the NBA, gave some insight into the attractiveness of an AFAM
major. He told the paper that
Afro-American and African Studies offered “more independent electives,
independent study. I could take a lot of
classes during the season.
Communications, I had to be there in the actual classroom. We just made sure all the classes I had to
take, I could take during the summer.”
The article didn’t stop with those amazing bits of
information that correlated with – and in large part seemed to verify – some of
the data of current 2012 academic scandal.
It noted that a small handful of past star basketball players had left
college early but had still managed to graduate. Of the half-dozen listed, four were from
North Carolina: Jerry Stackhouse, Antawn Jamison, Vince Carter, and the
aforementioned May. All four of the
athletes graduated with a degree in AFAM.
Furthermore, an academic anecdote involving Marvin Williams was
recounted in the article. He was the
second pick overall in the 2005 NBA draft after just one season at UNC. Yet according to a school spokesman, Williams
was working toward a degree and was (at the time of that 2010 article) a junior
academically. His major, like the other
star UNC players, was AFAM.
Kadie Otto, the head of the Drake Group at the time, told
the newspaper that her concern with clustering was that it raised questions
about whether athletes were being directed to a path of least academic
resistance. “I’m fascinated at the
longevity of North Carolina’s clustering,” Otto said. “It’s unbelievable.” She noted that big schools had mostly escaped
penalties tied to the NCAA’s academic progress rate (APR). “It begs the question, ‘How are they doing
it?’” Otto said. “They just seem to find
a way.”
The NCAA’s home offices were in Indianapolis, the same town as the “Star” newspaper. That made it especially convenient for the
paper to ask an NCAA official about UNC’s clustering. That official declined to comment, however,
saying the clustering was a campus issue.
Data throughout the years shows that multiple UNC men’s
basketball players had chosen AFAM, the department rife with academic scandal,
as their major. Along with the
aforementioned seven players from the 2005 national title team, plus
Stackhouse, Jamison, and Carter, other former players included Quentin Thomas,
Mike Copeland, George Lynch, and Ed Cota.
Those were just some of the ones who had declared AFAM as their major;
numerous other basketball players throughout the years were known to have taken
courses in the department in order to fill the needs of certain elective
categories.
John Blanchard, a senior associate athletics director at
UNC, told the paper it was reasonable that people in a peer group might
gravitate to the same major. He said
clustering “just doesn’t bother us here (at UNC)”. He continued: “The question is whether they
are getting a good education, and the answer to that is a resounding yes.” Two years later, as evidence of fraudulent
courses would be exposed, that indystar.com
article – and all the information held within, Blanchard’s quotes included –
was bathed in a much different light.
The article also should have served as a warning bell in 2010 to higher
authorities such as the NCAA, but that was not the case. The university may have heeded the warning to
an extent, however, as the number of basketball players claiming AFAM as a
major would coincidentally drop sharply following the publication of the Star article.
*
* *
When Roy Williams left Kansas to become the head
basketball coach at UNC in 2003, he did not come alone. Wayne Walden had been the academic adviser
for the men’s basketball team at Kansas for 15 years prior to his departure in
2003 to follow Williams to UNC where he had accepted a similar position on
Williams’ support staff for the Tar Heels.
In a July 3, 2003, article that appeared on the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World
website, Wayne Walden said that “The University of Kansas has been great to
me. It’s really tough to leave
here. The biggest thing I’ll miss is the
relationships with the students.” Walden
himself was a 1984 alumnus of the Kansas.
His loyalty, though, was apparently to Williams, and not to the school
from which he graduated.
One of Walden’s duties while at UNC, aside from being the
main academic adviser for the basketball team, was also to apparently oversee
the scheduling of classes for all of its players. According to the school’s “Office of the
University Registrar” webpage, members of the school’s Priority Registration
Advisory Committee (PRAC) decided which university groups or organizations
would receive priority registration in any given semester or year. Athletic teams were always some of those
groups, as they needed to try and schedule their players’ classes around
practice and game times. Past PRAC
documents listed on UNC’s website showed the teams which have received priority
clearance, and also the person responsible for submitting those eventual
scheduling requests. The past PRAC
schedule documents showed that during his time working as the main academic
adviser for UNC’s men’s basketball team, Wayne Walden was the person
responsible for submitting the players’ class registration requests to the
Priority Registration Advisory Committee.
Over the years, those registration requests would have included a
multitude of courses in the AFAM department – for the many players who claimed
it as a major, as well as for players who were taking such courses as
electives. That would seem to indicate
that Walden not only had intimate knowledge of the basketball players’ course
selections, but possibly also a direct hand in explicitly guiding them to those
academic destinations.
Walden remained alongside head coach Roy Williams and
with the men’s basketball team until the summer of 2009, just after the team
won its second national title during his (and Williams’) time in Chapel
Hill. During the closing remarks of the
team banquet in mid-May of 2009, Roy Williams said the following: “You guys have heard… a lot of guys…. Wayne,
stand up a second. Everybody clap for
Wayne. I told Wayne that I wasn’t going
to do this, but Wayne I’ve said this to my team and they’ve gotten over it so
you’ve got to get over it too. I
lied. I’ve been a head coach for 21
years. … Wayne Walden has been with me
for 21 years. And Wayne Walden came to
North Carolina just trusting me and Coach Holladay that things were gonna work
out alright… Wayne Walden found a jewel, and he’s going to get married this
summer, and Wayne Walden at the end of the summer will be leaving us. And it’s funny … our academic guy is the best
you can possibly be. I’d rather lose
every assistant coach, together… than lose Wayne Walden. You guys heard it a little bit here… each
young man talking about Wayne helping them with their academic side and getting
their degree. For 21 years I’ve trusted
one person… Coach Holladay helps, there’s no question about that. He’s the person on staff that’s the main
contact with Wayne. But for 21 years
I’ve trusted one guy, with everything academically for every player I’ve ever
coached. … I’d ask him about Ty… he’s
never had to go back and check and say I’ll get back to you, because it’s been
his life. … I just want you to know that I’ve been lucky. To be at Kansas, I’ve been lucky to be at the
University of North Carolina… but I’ve been really lucky to have the academic
advisor I’ve had for 21 years. Wayne,
thank you.”
*
* *
In a further example of just how little the mainstream
media and the general public had been aware of the academic indiscretions that
had been going on at UNC, an article entitled “Basketball champions make grades
academically, too” had appeared on a variety of news websites on April 23,
2009. It was written by AP Sports Writer
Michael Marot. Part of the article
covered the presumed longstanding academic accomplishments of the UNC program. Head coach Roy Williams had been unavailable
to comment for the article, but it noted that in the past “Williams has
credited Wayne Walden, the associate director of the academic support center,
for making academics a top priority.”
Then-current UNC Athletics Director Dick Baddour had given a statement
commending the six Tar Heel teams that had appeared on a recent NCAA Academic
Progress Rate “honor roll” list of sorts:
“That’s a credit to our coaches for recruiting true student athletes, to
the student athletes for staying committed to academic integrity, to our staff
for its timeless support and to the University of North Carolina for providing
the education and inspiration to achieve academically.”
The media and general public had obviously not been the
only groups who had bought into the pristine image of the academics of UNC’s
athletes. NCAA spokesman Erick
Christianson had said in that AP article, “There is a myth out there some hold
that you have to somehow sacrifice your studies to do well on the court and
that just isn’t true. This (APR list)
reinforces that you can excel in competition and in the classroom. So those who hold onto the dumb-jock myth,
it’s time to let it go.” Three years after Christianson’s
statement, the AFAM discoveries at UNC in the summer of 2012 suggested
otherwise. Christianson’s parent
association – the NCAA – was still nowhere to be found in Chapel Hill, however.
*
* *
The essential (and unanswered)
questions:
-- Why had Florida
State been forced by the NCAA to vacate numerous victories due to an academic
scandal that was essentially much narrower in scope than UNC’s – yet the NCAA
had thus far skipped judgment on the Tar Heel program?
-- Was the NCAA’s
penalizing of Penn State a public relations move, or would they be consistent
and treat other schools which blatantly placed athletics above academics the
same way?
-- Based on Roy
Williams’ references of “past mistakes,” how much had he truly known beforehand
about his players’ involvement in the over decade-long AFAM academic scandal?
-- Why had the NCAA not
investigated the suspicious pattern of athlete “clustering” at UNC when it was
reported in the mainstream media in April of 2010?
-- How many of the
seven AFAM majors on UNC’s 2005 basketball national title team had taken a
fraudulent course at the university?
-- How many of those
players’ transcripts, if investigated and reviewed by the NCAA, would have
shown strikingly similar class and grade patterns as the transcript of Julius
Peppers?
-- As an investigative
result of the above two questions, how many of those players would have then
been retroactively ineligible to participate in sports while at the UNC,
meaning any victories in which they had participated would need to be vacated?
-- To what extent was
academic adviser Wayne Walden involved in the scheduling of basketball players
in AFAM classes that were possibly known (within the UNC infrastructure) to be
fraudulent?
-- How would UNC’s
yearly Academic Progress Rates (APR’s) looked without the benefit of the
potentially numerous fraudulent AFAM courses?