Wiedmer: North Carolina Athletic Association is no friend of Louisville

In this April 8, 2013, file photo, Louisville players and head coach Rick Pitino celebrate after defeating Michigan 82-76 in the championship of the Final Four in the NCAA college basketball tournament in Atlanta. Louisville must vacate its 2013 men's basketball title following an NCAA appeals panel's decision to uphold sanctions against the men's program for violations committed in a sex scandal. The Cardinals will have to vacate 123 victories including the championship, and return millions in postseason revenue. The decision announced on Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2018, by the governing body's Infraction Appeals Committee ruled that the NCAA has the authority to take away championships for what it considers major rule violations. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara, File)
In this April 8, 2013, file photo, Louisville players and head coach Rick Pitino celebrate after defeating Michigan 82-76 in the championship of the Final Four in the NCAA college basketball tournament in Atlanta. Louisville must vacate its 2013 men's basketball title following an NCAA appeals panel's decision to uphold sanctions against the men's program for violations committed in a sex scandal. The Cardinals will have to vacate 123 victories including the championship, and return millions in postseason revenue. The decision announced on Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2018, by the governing body's Infraction Appeals Committee ruled that the NCAA has the authority to take away championships for what it considers major rule violations. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara, File)

Good thing North Carolina didn't use the same legal team as Louisville for the Tar Heels' NCAA issues. If it had, it might have lost two national championship banners instead of none and had to repay 16 years worth of NCAA tournament revenue instead of none.

Wow!

That's really all anyone can possibly utter today after the NCAA's Infraction Appeals Committee ruled that the Cardinals must vacate their 2013 NCAA basketball title, vacate 123 wins and return perhaps as much as $1 million or more in tourney revenue following the scandal involving the furnishing of prostitutes and strippers to recruits.

photo University of Louisville interim President Dr. Greg Postel speaks to the media during a news conference, Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2018, in Louisville, Ky. Louisville must vacate its 2013 men's basketball title following an NCAA appeals panel's decision to uphold sanctions against the men's program in the sex scandal case. The Cardinals will have to vacate 123 victories including the championship, and return some $600,000 in conference revenue from the 2012-15 NCAA Tournaments. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)

Did the NCAA overreach, as U of L claimed? Who knows? After giving UNC a free pass on 16 years of bogus classes that hugely helped keep athletes eligible while also boosting the GPAs of a student body that shouldn't have needed such fraudulent assistance if UNC is the vastly superior academic institution it advertises itself to be, it would seem all but impossible for the NCAA to wield a heavy hammer on any program for anything short of violent crimes.

Then again, if you're the kind of parent you should be and you discover a Hall of Fame coach such as Rick Pitino has attempted to lure your impressionable young basketball star to his program by enticing him with prostitutes and strippers within an on-campus athletic dorm, the words used by the NCAA to describe this case - "disgusting" and "inexcusable" and "repugnant" and "disgraceful" - don't go far enough.

In some cases, these players were underage. You wonder if sexual assault or rape charges could have been brought against Cards assistant Andre McGee, who reportedly organized such parties and events.

One also has to wonder what Louisville's second nightmare - its considerable footprint in an ongoing FBI investigation into college basketball corruption that has charged the school with funneling $100,000 to the family of signee Brian Bowen - didn't have an unofficial role in the denied appeal.

The committee assuredly will say the cases are separate, but when you're awaiting an appeal on one serious charge and your school is hit with an equal or worse charge, it might also be naive to believe one didn't impact the other.

If nothing else, Notre Dame's denied appeal for a far less massive academic cheating scandal and this latest action against Louisville signals that not all NCAA appeal committees are created equal. The idea that NCAA actually stands for North Carolina Athletic Association picks up steam daily.

Not that that's necessarily a good or fair thing moving forward.

Though some of us have joked about this, one of the NCAA's arguments for not penalizing UNC was that the classes were available to all students, bogus though they were. So if Louisville had used prostitutes and strippers to recruit all its students - whether their talents were related to basketball, music, chemistry or physics - would that have saved it?

Making a more logical argument, what if the university handed $25,000 in cash to every student who received a full-ride scholarship, regardless if it was academic or athletic in nature? What then?

If every scholarship student gets a sizable wad of cash, is it cheating to reward the athlete the same as the violinist?

True story. In the 1970s, a certain Southern university was charged with having one of those deep-freezer-sized televisions in its athletic dorm but nowhere else, which made the school in violation of NCAA rules. Angered by this finding, the school's well-heeled boosters reportedly purchased similar televisions for every dorm on campus. Problem solved.

There's also this: Louisville banned itself from the 2016 NCAA tournament, which it had a realistic chance to win, in an effort to soften its penalties. UNC chose to deny, deny, deny that it gained any competitive advantage from its bogus courses. Which defense do you think future schools will embrace moving forward?

But the biggest problem the NCAA may face is that there is no sense of fairness felt by its 350 Division I institutions not named the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. They've watched an already perceived sacred cow skate on one of the most obvious cases of academic fraud over the past 50 years - at least partly because UNC reportedly ran up more than $18 million in legal fees - and they deservedly want to know what happened to their Get Out of Jail Free cards.

Life may not be fair but it needs to be just, and there is nothing just about any ruling the NCAA makes other than no ruling after its North Carolina fiasco.

But at least when the NCAA forced Louisville to vacate its 2013 NCAA title on Tuesday, it declined to demand that Pitino have that giant red-and-black Old English "L" tattoo removed from his back that he got after the Cards' (brief) third title.

Not that the artist who rendered that tattoo, Adam Potts, wouldn't alter it if Pitino asked.

"We do cover-ups all the time," Potts told the Louisville Courier-Journal. "I've definitely covered up way worse than that. "My go-to cover-ups are usually animals. But I also have done roses and flowers, anything with a lot of shading."

At this point, a donkey, pig or cockroach all would seem fitting choices.

But whatever ultimately happens to Ricky P's tattoo, a word of advice is in order for the next school that goes before the NCAA's Infractions Committee or its Appeal Committee: Hire North Carolina's legal eagles instead of Louisville's.

Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.

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