With his aw-shucks demeanor, Ol’ Roy Williams is a hard guy to actively dislike. But every once in a while he says something stupid and reminds you who he is and what he does for a living. Take his crack about the difficulties of admissions at UNC, which, he says, is much more difficult to deal with than Duke: “In our situation, it’s not changing very much because North Carolina is such a good school and the requirements to get in are pretty darned difficult. I don’t think any other school in the ACC has as much difficulty as we do getting kids in, even Duke. They talk a big game.”

Oh, please. According to Director of Undergraduate Admissions Stephen Farmer, a full half of Butch Davis’s first class is composed of academic exceptions. And this is the school which once signed a basketball player with a 400 SAT, and which took Dwight Jones, a receiver who signed with Clemson but who was turned away by the admissions department there for poor academics. Like UNC, Clemson is a good school, but they don’t exactly have a history of letting academics get in the way of Saturday afternoon.

According to the N&O, “[r]ecruited student-athletes are referred to [a review committee] committee if they score below 900 combined on the Critical Reading and Math portions of the SAT; score below 400 on any section of the SAT; score below 19 composite on the ACT; or have a class rank below the 50th percentile.”

Now these are football examples and strictly speaking that might not be fair. But it’s hard to imagine that football would get an easier deal from admissions in Chapel Hill than basketball.