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Sports of The Times

Shoe Deals and Double Standards at North Carolina

Thirteen of North Carolina Coach Larry Fedora's players were suspended for selling university-issued sneakers.Credit...Gerry Broome/Associated Press

Coach Larry Fedora’s boys got caught in a snarl of N.C.A.A. misdemeanors last week, and that left him deeply saddened. Thirteen of his football players at the University of North Carolina were nabbed after selling university-issued commemorative Nike basketball sneakers to a local outlet.

The players face suspensions of one to four games.

“I’m extremely disappointed in our players’ actions and how their actions reflect on the university and our department,” Fedora told reporters. “My responsibility is to help grow them into men. So they are going to face the consequences of their action.”

Fedora’s boss, Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham, was mournful. “We are disappointed when we fall short,” he said.

Elite college sports is a car so broken it might be best to let a chop shop have it and sell the thing off for parts. This scandal, though, is best played for giggles, not least the notion that these players’ actions reflect badly on their university.

Let’s concede the crime: Thirteen football players who sacrifice body and brain without a penny of compensation beyond scholarships broke a tenet of N.C.A.A. faith by selling their freebie basketball sneakers. (Note: Football players play in cleats.)

The deeply disappointed University of North Carolina is the same temple of higher learning that was discovered to have indulged in two decades of mass academic fraud, providing fake classes and guaranteed passing grades for dozens of basketball and football stars. Euphemistically known as paper classes, the courses offered by the African and Afro-American Studies Department required no attendance, perhaps a rudimentary paper and little to no conscious thought. The bottom line was transactional: Allow athletes to keep their grades at the minimum needed to let them sweat and compete for the university.

Mary Willingham, a learning specialist with the athletic department, took much guff from Tar Heels fans for pulling back the covers on this scandal. She offered to prove to the revered basketball coach Roy Williams that a former player could neither read nor write. Williams shook his head: No, no, no. “It’s not my place,” he said.

He offered an avowal of stubborn faith over fact: “I don’t believe it’s true.”

I called B. David Ridpath, a former athletics compliance officer and now a professor of sports administration at Ohio University, to ask if coaches and athletic directors can plausibly plead a fog of ignorance. He said they could not. Athletes sign waivers when they arrive on campus that let the athletics department monitor their grade achievements and woes.

“There is a huge apparatus on these campuses designed to keep these athletes eligible,” Ridpath said. “And that is very much different from ensuring they get an education.”

Leave the front-line coaches alone for a moment. They receive multimillion-dollar salaries and have the virtue of unambiguous direction from university leaders: Win.

The University of North Carolina is a top academic institution, with fine professors and departments. So when its accrediting agency, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, came calling in 2013 and asked about this scandal, the university offered a confession. A professor and a couple of administrators, U.N.C. stated, had committed “academic fraud.”

This admission was calculated. Administrators sought to erect a firewall around a single troubled department and a few professors.

University officials pledged to mop up the mess. No current student who took such a course, they vowed, could count those credits toward a degree. Alumni would have to make arrangements, too. In 2016, the accreditation agency awarded U.N.C. a kiss of approval. “Where we are today has taken deep introspection,” North Carolina’s chancellor, Carol Folt, said.

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North Carolina Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham. The university’s deal with Nike is ending; it expects its next one to be worth millions more.Credit...Gerry Broome/Associated Press

Introspection can be soul cleansing.

A year later, an N.C.A.A. committee took up its investigation of the scandal, an inquiry that threatened the university with the loss of a basketball championship and suspensions.

Enough with introspection and hair shirts. University officials said their description of “academic fraud” was “a typographical error.”

I have tried and failed to summon the image of the U.N.C. administrator who intended to write “fabulous courses” and mistyped “academic fraud.” Perhaps its biology department perfected a vaccination against embarrassment.

I called and emailed the university this week to ask about those promises. Beth Keith, the associate vice chancellor for university communications, was kind enough to get back.

She noted, fair enough, that this scandal applied to no current player. Then she addressed those phony classes. “The irregular courses didn’t meet the university’s academic expectations, but that didn’t make them fraudulent or fake.”

Oh.

And, she wrote, “the grades counted and the credits remain on transcripts.”

Oh.

The professor and advisers at the center of this scandal were pushed out. Cunningham, the athletic director who was not at the university as the scandal took seed and who managed the fallout, received a raise. He now is paid $740,000, with another $60,000 for entertainment and $200,000 in annual deferred compensation, a benefit heretofore available only to U.N.C.’s president and chancellor. The chancellor makes less money than Cunningham does. Cunningham even was reimbursed for the cost of using an agent to negotiate his contract.

When I last wrote of this scandal, Tar Heels alumni crowded my email inbox and offered poor reviews for my work. This was an academic, not an athletic, scandal, they insisted. I wonder if that argument was reassuring to out-of-state parents who fork over $50,000 a year for their children to attend this elite institution. As to the argument that this scandal was not about athletics, even the gummy N.C.A.A. did not go that far.

Its report noted that the university had, in fact, run one of the worst academic scams in recent history, and that “the classes disproportionately favored student-athlete enrollments” with a pleasing effect on the athletes’ grade point averages.

“They are managing perception rather than dealing with the issues,” the North Carolina history professor Jay Smith said of the university’s leadership. He is a frequent and incisive critic of the university’s actions. “They’ve never done what you’d expect a reputable institution to do.”

Much alumni abuse over the years was heaped upon Dan Kane, the fine reporter from The News & Observer in Raleigh who exposed this corruption and whose paper has waged a battle against those who would turn a fine university into a sports factory outlet.

Talk of outlets circles us back to the sneaker caper.

The current players, including the team’s potential starting quarterback and two top defenders, have received suspensions of varying lengths. They sold their commemorative sneakers for as much as $2,500, which is a nice piece of change.

Others on campus earn far bigger chunks of change for sneaker deals. The university is completing a $36.85 million deal with Nike and expects to sign a more lucrative one. The University of Texas and Ohio State recently signed deals with Nike in the neighborhood of $250 million.

The coaches Williams and Fedora make $2.1 million and $1.8 million, respectively, in salary and incentives. The gentlemen have side deals with Nike, although the university does not require them to divulge those details, as that is their “personal business.”

We can, however, hazard a guess that they are worth far more than what the undergraduate football players got for trying to peddle their sneakers.

Email: powellm@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Players Sell Their Shoes, And That’s the Scandal?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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