The 2004-05 North Carolina Tar Heels basketball team, winners of that season's national championship, was filled with players taking a multitude of fake courses, per a revealing follow-up report by the Raleigh News & Observer.
According to Matt Norlander of CBS Sports, "Saturday's story was a specific continuation to a June story from the paper and its reporter, Dan Kane, who reported five players who were part of the academic fraud culture that permeated through the athletic department and to UNC's overall student body."
An independent report filed in October by former U.S. Justice Department Kenneth Wainstein uncovered fraudulent courses in the Afro and African American Studies department available from 1993 through 2011, revealing that more than 1,500 student-athletes at UNC were beneficiaries of the sham classes during those 18 years.
Per Saturday's report, 35 phony courses were taken by players on the 2004-05 title team. Nine of those courses were taken in the fall, while 26 were taken during the spring semester while UNC marched to a #1 seed and its first of two championships under coach Roy Williams.
Seeing that the NCAA has re-opened its investigation into the case, the punishments that could be coming to UNC's basketball program might very well be unprecedented.
Here's some additional information from the Raleigh News & Observer report filed on Saturday, providing more damning evidence that could end up haunting the Tar Heels program:
The classes, some advertised as lectures but that never met and others listed as independent studies, were supervised by Deborah Crowder, a manager in African and Afro-American studies who [Wainstein] says graded required end-of-semester work leniently as part of a “paper class” scheme to keep athletes eligible. Crowder was not a professor and admitted to investigators that she assigned grades without reading the papers.
The N&O reported in June that five members of the championship team, including four key players, had relied heavily on the paper classes: 52 enrollments during their time at UNC. The Wainstein documents, however, have more detail and show a heavy concentration during the spring semester of 2005, when the team was driving toward a national title. ... At least five players took three bogus classes each, the Wainstein documents show.
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The Wainstein documents also reveal a friendly relationship between Crowder and Wayne Walden, coach Roy Williams' hand-picked academic counselor for the basketball team. They show the two working together to get players into the classes and Walden providing tickets and other team freebies to Crowder.
A fair amount of this information correlates with claims made by a member of the 2004-05 team, Rashad McCants, who publicly discredited Roy Williams and the UNC basketball program in the spring. McCants claimed that he almost never did any of his assignments, relying on school tutors to make the dean's list in 2005. However, Weinstein notes that McCants' claims can't be fully corroborated with the information currently available.
Wainstein's report indicates that 363 former men's basketball players in total were enrolled in fake courses over an 18-year span, averaging to just over 20 per year.
Crowder, listed in the report as the primary facilitator of the long-term academic scandal, retired back in 2009.
Stay tuned to Chat Sports and our North Carolina Tar Heels team page for all the latest fallout from this report as additional information is made available to press.
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