Yesterday we broke the news about an NCAA investigation at North Carolina, an investigation that includes inquiries into possible improper benefits received by UNC football players, including rent, jewelry, and travel. The inevitable firestorm ensued here, as fans are naturally concerned about how this may impact the upcoming season.
One thing to understand during these circumstances is that the NCAA imposes confidentiality requirements during investigations. An institution doesn’t want to break the rules of the organization during an investigation into breaking that organization’s rules. For that reason, don’t expect Inside Carolina to be reporting North Carolina’s commentary on the investigation, because there isn’t going to be any commentary coming from North Carolina.
We expect, however, that this situation will be resolved quickly.
The NCAA doesn’t want to drag this out and neither does North Carolina. The Tar Heels can avoid a harsher penalty, having to void victories, etc., if they deal with any required suspensions before the season. The University of Southern California received their recent sanctions for events that dated back to 2004, six years ago.
Some have likened these circumstances to those that caused Oklahoma State Dez Bryant’s suspension last year. There is one critical difference here, which is Bryant wasn’t actually suspended for visiting with Deion Sanders, but for lying to investigators about having visited with Sanders.
The key here for the players is to be totally forthcoming with investigators. Whether any player did anything that would result in a season-long suspension is in question, but it is a dead certainty that lying to investigators will get a player suspended.
Do not read into the above statements that any player suspensions are forthcoming. Perhaps there will be suspensions, perhaps there won’t be any player suspensions.
There was a report in the Columbus Dispatch a year ago that an Oklahoma player received improper benefits from a sports agent. The violation was discovered in 2008. The player reportedly attended an NFL Draft party as the guest of a former teammate. The $1,300 trip was paid for by the former teammates’ agent. The player was required to pay $832 to a charity from his Pell grant, and also the school-issued spending money he received during the team’s trip to the BCS championship game. The name of the player involved has never been disclosed by Oklahoma. We do not know if the player graduated or otherwise left the team before the next season, but since there was no mention of the player being suspended, we assume that is the case.
The point is that, as of yet, we do not know if the NCAA will find any player violated a rule, and if that is their finding, we do not know what possible penalty they might impose.
It is too easy to get drawn into speculation and rumor in these situations, and since the information being gathered is also being tightly controlled, any statement you see about a particular outcome is likely premature. In these situations, speculation about outcomes does more harm than good.
We encourage fans here to resist the urge to make statements based on information from sources that may have incomplete information, and as far as we can tell all sources have incomplete information at this juncture.
As soon as Inside Carolina has anything solid to report, rest assured that we will.
There is one outcome of the investigation that is known at this time: Any further forecasting of UNC’s season has to be placed on hold until the outcome is known. There is no way to comment intelligently on UNC’s prospects this season if one or more prominent players are suspended for all or even part of the season.
For now, that’s bad enough.