Just when things seemed to be calming down a bit or UNC, Larry Fedora inadvertently stirred them back up.
If you aren’t up to speed, here are the basics: Illinois fired former head coach Tim Beckman after allegations of players mistreatment. Beckman is a friend of Fedoras and Fedora brought him on as a volunteer assistant coach.
Chancellor Carol Folt got wind of it and now Beckman is gone.
Okay, there’s the skinny.
All of this of course is framed, inevitably, by the series of scandals, frauds and criminal charges that define those scandals.
This is perfectly summed up by the N&O’s Luke DeCock, who said the following, which, actually, is a pretty good summary for an NCAA argument for lack of institutional control: “Even if Beckman deserved a second chance in this business, which he does not, surely there’s a better place to do it than North Carolina, which is still in the gazillion-dollar process of rehabbing a reputation as a school where just about everything that can go wrong with college athletics – agents paying players, a coach acting as a runner for agents, decades of academic fraud – went wrong because no one was paying attention.”
If you want to know what a schmuck Beckman was, you can read Illinois’ report on what transpired. It’s not pretty.
As for Fedora, no one is going to fire him over this. First of all, as he correctly realizes, it won’t be a story for long because his friend was pushed right out the moon door as soon as people understood how stupid this was (well, maybe not Fedora).
But it’s not the first time his judgement has been lacking. When UNC won the Coastal Division in 2015, he praised his team for winning football games - and never thought to mention academics. Mind you, this is in the middle of the epic scandal which has brought so much shame to Chapel Hill.
A smarter man would’ve made sure to point out how UNC was now trying to do everything right. It never occurred to Fedora, just as, apparently, it never occurred to him that people would get severely bent when he hired a guy who abused players, and then there’s the whole issue of concussions, as Barry Jacobs wrote about earlier this week. This whole thing was just tone deaf at best.
We would ask what he was thinking, but we get the sense that Fedora doesn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about anything but football and in UNC’s current environment, that makes him a bad fit - and with demonstrably poor judgement, potentially another disaster waiting to happen.