NCAA Proves Once Again It Doesn't Care About Classes

So the University of North Carolina is off the hook. After two decades of steering football and basketball players into fake classes in its African and Afro-American Studies Department so that they could remain eligible to play -- without question, the worst academic scandal in the history of college sports -- the National Collegiate Athletic Association concluded Friday morning that it would take no action against the university or its sports teams. The scandal, it said, was beyond its jurisdiction.

The NCAA’s rationale, according to Greg Sankey, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, who led the panel that made the decision, was that the classes weren’t “solely created, offered and maintained as an orchestrated effort to benefit student-athletes,” but were also offered to nonathletes. In addition, Sankey said, “the NCAA defers to its member schools to determine whether academic fraud occurred and the panel is bound to making decisions within the rules set by the membership.”