Some of those grades allowed athletes to stay eligible. Some helped them graduate. All of them cheated young men and women out of their education — you know, the reason they were supposed to be at North Carolina in the first place.
This was largely the work of two former employees, but it was hardly a covert operation. Academic advisers steered athletes to the fraudulent classes, and “this steering was most prevalent among the counselors for the revenue sports of football and men’s basketball.”
The emphasis is mine, but the words are those of Kenneth Wainstein, the former U.S. assistant attorney general asked by North Carolina to investigate the fraud. While some of the players involved surely preceded Williams’ time — the fraud dated to 1993 and Williams didn’t arrive until 2003 — Rashad McCants told ESPN’s Outside the Lines that he never wrote his own papers.
“For some of the premier players, we didn’t write our papers,” McCants, a member of the North Carolina team that won the national title in 2005, told Outside the Lines in June 2014, three years after the Raleigh News & Observer began reporting on the academic irregularities.
“It was very simple,” McCants said. “When it was time to turn in our papers for our `paper classes,’ we would get a call from our tutors, we would all pack up in one big car, or pack up in two cars, and ride over to the tutor’s house, pick up our papers and go about our business.”