NCAA Really Must Come Down Hard on North Carolina

I'm not usually one to play the "double-standard" card. It's a bit too fan boyish to point to some apparently outlandish flouting of NCAA rules, like the North Carolina men's basketball team's sham classes that former player Rashad McCants admits to being a part of and says coach Roy Williams knew about it, too, and whine that UConn was punished for seemingly much more innocuous APR mistakes. UConn didn't do a good job educating some of its college basketball players in recent years past and, at the very least, was guilty of being negligent and not working the system like other schools do.

That said, this UNC stuff is ridiculous. And, well, it really would be a miscarriage of justice if the Tar Heels weren't properly punished. The NCAA complains and says it doesn't have enough staff to carry out extensive investigations into academic and other issues involving student-athletes. Typically, it has new organizations -- Yahoo ! Sports, for instance, as you all recall -- do the bulk of its legwork.

Well, ESPN (which I can't even watch anymore, but that's a different story) has done just about all the work here. It has served the NCAA both UNC and, perhaps, Roy Williams on a silver platter, and if all this is true, the organization must do something about it. Something pretty big.