File photo by Al DragoMaryland fans during a women’s basketball game last spring Conference expansion, it turns out, is a car than can turn in more than one direction. The ACC last contracted in 1971, when founding member South Carolina left in a dispute over academic standards. Since then, the ACC has only gotten bigger: […]
Thad Williamson
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UNC’s slow-moving football scandal has its roots in decisions made 60 years ago
It has been nearly a quarter-century since a Triangle university won so much as a share of the ACC Football Championship. In 1989, when the Steve Spurrier-coached Duke team shared the title with Virginia, it was the Blue Devils’ only football title in the past 50 years. The record of futility at N.C. State and […]
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Four bad arguments against the NCAA’s Penn State ruling (and one good one)
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. A 1906 magazine cover spoofing the role of football on college campuses Monday’s announcement of the NCAA’s “unprecedented” penalties against Penn State’s football program in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal has generally drawn praise from pundits inside and outside the sports world. The NCAA […]
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Hang on to the good days of the ACC
As another college basketball season dawns in the Triangle, it feels like the latter days of a soon-to-be-extinguished era and that Apocalypse may be just around the corner. Consider the evidence. Summertime scandalsmostly in college football, including that (relatively small) one in Chapel Hillbrought college sports as a whole under a level of suspicion not […]
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A kick in the teeth to the UNC fan: Why vacating wins matters
File photo by D.L. Anderson UNC released its response to the NCAA’s Notice of Allegations (NOA) on Monday, in advance of next month’s hearings with the NCAA in Indianapolis. The short version of the story is that in eight of nine alleged violations, we can drop the term “alleged.” The university agrees with the NCAA’s […]
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Sharing the pie: practical reforms for NCAA sports—Part 2
Photo by Adam David KissickA Duke player during warms-up during a preseason practice last month. This is Part 2 of an essay in which the author proposes modest, achievable reforms that could address inequities in the perennially troubled system of college athletics. Part 1 is here. 4. Provide an increased stipend in the scholarship sports, […]
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Forget the radical reforms, here are realistic proposals for cleaning up college football (Part 1)
Photo by Jeremy M. LangeA UNC football player keeps cool during a preseason workout. College sports are not going to be abolished, they are not going to be turned into an Ivy League model and they are not likely anytime soon to be converted into freestanding professional teams. For better or worse, the unique system […]
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A Duke economist examines the costs and benefits of big-time college sports
Big-Time Sports in American Universities By Charles Clotfelter Cambridge University Press 313 pp. Is big-time college football good for society? That is, in essence, the question posed by Charles Clotfelter’s remarkably well-timed book, Big-Time Sports in American Universities, published last spring. Clotfelter is an economics professor at Duke University, and he utilizes the tools of […]
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Withers the high road to football success at UNC?
This is Part 2 of a two-part story; read Part 1 here. Photo by Al DragoButch Davis and David Cutcliffe at a media event a week before the UNC coach was fired. For many of UNC’s “basketball first” fans, and perhaps some “all sports” fans, success in football means a winning record, appearances in bowl […]
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Holden vs. Butch: Collision of cultures at UNC
This is Part 1 of a two-part story; read Part 2 here. File photo by Al Drago On July 27, Holden Thorp, the genteel, baby-faced chancellor of the University of North Carolina, fired one of the highest-paid and highest-profile employees of his institution, the drawling, $1.7 million-per-annum football coach, Butch Davis. The applause from the […]