RIP Dean Smith

If the academic scandal is mentioned at all, it should be made abundantly clear that Dean Smith had nothing to do with it, and the exhaustive Wainstein report found no evidence that he, or Bill Guthridge, were aware of it.

 

I wonder if Calipari's obit will mention vacated Final Fours and NCAA penalties. He has a similar defense.

 

I have an uncle going down with Alzheimer's and it's just a sad thing to see. The weird thing about him, though, was the last time I talked to him, about 9 months ago, he could relate accurately in detail events that happened 60 years ago, but couldn't remember what he had for lunch three hours earlier.

 

No he doesn't. The situations are very different. The "no show" classes didn't start until two years after Smith retired and UNC gave a former federal prosecutor carte blanche to get to the bottom of it. That prosecutor found no evidence Smith did anything wrong and it's not even clear if any of Smith's players benefitted.

The behavior that caused UMass and Memphis' Final Fours to be vacated occurred while he was coach and neither university did anything comparable to what UNC has done to investigate the matters.

 

Head coaches know better than to let anything get traced back directly to them. That's my point. Fifty-four Dean Smith players took paper classes and it all started on his watch. That has to be a part of his legacy, even if it's a small part compared to his activism and on-court contributions. Especially when you consider that at least one former UNC player is essentially saying the institutionalized academic fraud undermined some of the civil rights work Dean Smith did.

 

You clearly don't understand the findings of the Wainstein report. Have you even read it?

 

I read it months, but I'm sure not as intently as you. What I came away with was that he couldn't interview Smith or Guthridge, but the program's academic advisers at that time were aware of the paper classes. I know nothing was directly tied to Dean Smith, but things rarely are directly connected to head coaches and they all make sure they can claim ignorance. If the standard was to nail the head coach no program would ever get punished for anything.

Maybe I'm missing something and no being fair, but I think it has to be included as a small part of what was, for the most part, an overwhelmingly positive legacy.

 

Was Sam Gilbert mentioned in John Wooden's obit?
Coach seemed to keep his hands clean as that was going in under his watch.

 

I'm sure I'm overly defensive, as it is a sad day for those of us connected to UNC. And I have been quite publicly critical of the university over the academic scandal. The criticism is much deserved.

What the Wainstein report had to say about Coach Smith was, as you mentioned, that they were not able to talk to him because of his illness. They also reviewed student records and found that between the AFAM department's creation in the mid-70s and his retirement in 1997 that there were 54 enrollments by players - not 54 players - in independent studies courses in AFAM. They could not say with any certainty whether any of the player enrollments between 1993, when the irregular independent studies classes began, and his retirement in 1997 were irregular classes or whether they were a traditional independent study. Prior to Julius Nyang'oro taking over AFAM in 1992 it was an academically rigorous department - and outside his classes from 1993 forward, remained so. It remains unclear whether any of the players on the basketball team from 93-97 benefited. Would it surprise me? No. I mean Rasheed Wallace was on campus then, and I believe his declared major was AFAM. It was Stackhouse's major as well.

But there has never been anything that shows a Dean Smith player benefited from the shenanigans in the AFAM department. If they did it was at most two fraudulent courses per player because the University had a cap on how many independent studies courses a student could take. That's bad. But what happened in 1999 was the administrative assistant behind this whole mess figured out how to get around cap by creating fraudulent lecture courses that never met and functioned the same way. It was in '99 when enrollment in these fake AFAM courses began to balloon and you created the scenario where a player like Rashad McCants could go an entire semester without ever attending a class or meeting with a professor.

Personally, I don't think Dean Smith owns any of this in his legacy. This isn't John Wooden looking the other way when Sam Gilbert was handing out cash.. The administrative assistant set this scam up in a way that made it hard to detect early on and red flags didn't start popping up until well after he had retired. But if it must be included, I think it should be as I said earlier: A small piece that makes clear the Wainstein report found no evidence of wrongdoing. That's how the N&O handled it, and I thought it was respectful and appropriate.

 

Yes, he was.

 

Some of them, yes.