Truth is it’s not Mack’s fault…It’s the culture at UNC and the Basketball only crowd and it goes back to the 50s…
This was written by the Daily Tar Heel back then…Who was on 99.9 when the scandal hit calling for Butch Davis job and really the death penalty for UNC football…Art Chanskey (what a POS he is)…
That’s what is wrong with UNC football it’s all internal…Nothing can outshine what Dean built…
Notice during the scandal that everything was good with the NCAA as long as it was about Football…What happened when Men’s basketball got brought up…Lawyers and UNC said no this is not happening…
Now you've gone and done it. Archer and his ilk will now hate you.
So let me help you get hated fully, though some Dean Smith worshippers will be glad that I place it fully as before him and something that would have gotten established in UNC stone if McGuire had never heard of Smith.
After the GI Bill, many in college administration around the country became incensed that they then would be expected to alter their basic core requirements to serve military veterans most off whom would not have taken the kinds of courses in HS to get properly prepared. All that was true, and you can see it when you know UNC history in that regard. It was fully a classic liberal arts college, and if you did not have at least 3 years ion HS Latin that well taught, you were at a. huge disadvantage. Future prominent novelist and historian Shelby Foote had to sit a year and get tutored to get admitted to UNC. I met him twice at academic conferences. The man was brilliant.
Many of the GI Bill types were like Choo Choo in that they were entering well past age 19 and had been hardened by military service (sop they were NOT like entering college boys) and tended toward the practical - Land Grant schools served them best overall and gained the most from them. Many also were hoping to play a sport, most often football.
That coincided with a wave across many elite private schools to oppose the 'growing professionalism' in college sports. Those academics tok hard stands against athletic scholarships for any sport and particularly focused on tamping football down, because they believed that if football was allowed to be BIGm then all other sports on. that campus would become equally 'professionalized' and thus detrimental to the university. The Ivy League, which featured heavily guys who became All-American right top to rage early 1950s, followed up on those ideas by ending all athletic scholarships and acting to make all sports on campus equal, which meant tamping down on football.
In the South, UVA had been doing that since the height of the Great Depression, which is the reason that when the ACC was founded, UVA was an independent and not in the SoCon. UVA only started to get away from that idea when George Welsh was hired, and the school hired a guy from Navy, not expecting him to do what he did.
At UNC, it meant that administrators wanted to make certain that UNC stopped being red football national power it was. Back then, there were only 4 bowls, and when UNC went to 3 consecutive bowls with Choo Choo, only 3-5 programs across the nation had done that before UNC. In 1950, UNC was a true Nation Name Brand in football, and it was not such in basketball. Football was far and way THE sport among both students and alums, the one that radio coveted to cover.
UNC was leader in creating a half-measure from the Ivy League example: UNC would continue to have athletic scholarships, but UNC would act to keep a lid on its football. If football were indeed the great bad actor, then UNC by holding its down could have scholarships for athletes and still nit be tainted by professionalism in college sports.
The monkey wrench in their plans was that Moo, unable to compete with UNC or Dook in football, had decided to go whole hawk in basketball. They made. genius move to hire one of the two greatest HC+S basketball coaches in IN hisoptry: Everett case (the other was John Wooden). IN was the real home of HS basketball being made KING, and Case knew how to bring that NCSC and the SoCon. He intend to make both his school and its league basketball-first, and have football be a mere follower, as it was in IN HS sports.
The nature of competition, especially when schools are co closely placed, meant that as soon as Case was a big winer in Raleigh with plans tobulod the largest gym inn campus in the country, there were growing demeans by some UNC alums and students ti not let Moo beat UNC at anything. They wanted to top what Moo was doing in basketball as well.
The anti-football people at UNC saw that growing clamor as their godsend: they would keep football down -precisely by making UNC basketball as professionalized as possible. They went to the epicenter of professionalized college basketball: NYC. They targeted and signed the HC of the college program that all NBA franchises looked at as being ideal: Frank McGuire of St Johns. They felt that if McGuire could topple Case, then UNC fans would start to become more focused own basketball, as long as football was wallowing in mediocrity. gtheyb were right, And when 32-0 UNC won the NCAA in 1957, they saw total victory over 'professionalized football' just ahead. The death ion Jim Tatum and the hiring off Jim Hickey secured their plan.
All of that is the reason that when the AFAM scam broke, UNC was filled with administrators and professors who immediately blamed football, and only football, and demanded the head of Butch Davis. Davis really infuriated them early on when he made it clear that he knew that a higher percentage of both women's and men's basketball players than of football players took AFAM independent study classes. And Matt Doherty revived animus against him by noting that none other than Debbie Crowder herself had complained that those classes which she designed to help at risk female and black students had been over taken by members of black fraternities.
It was not any kind of sports scandal. It was scandal of academics playing group identity politics and naturally becoming dirty, because politics is dirty as all Hell. And football was not even close to be the center of abuse just among atyghekotes at UNC. Yet football was the only sport, and the only UNC entity or organization, to be run over the coals and blamed by UNC officials.
Basketball-onlys and basketballl-firsters either have the character to face that or they do not.
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