Classy Is As Classy Does!

This article from the Chapel Hill News features the normal amount of moral self-preening from the world of the diminished blue; the rest of the college sports world has come to expect that. But this sentence jumps out:

"Can you imagine the UNC basketball team having to deal with anything remotely close to the Duke lacrosse scandal?"

Well, yes, we can.

For the record, isn't it about time this was called the Crystal Mangum scandal?  But we digress.

Although one hopes that things have changed since the lacrosse party, college sports teams, both male and female, have been hiring strippers for years.  You may recall that St. John's had a scandal which was terrifically damaging: the team hired a stripper in Pittsburgh, who accused several of them of raping her.  The team had the bad taste and good fortune of videotaping the evening's events, which kept them out of court, but also got three of them kicked out and three others suspended and ended up bringing Mike Jarvis down.

It's nothing new; what was new was that a perfect storm of media hysteria and kneejerk reaction made Duke a lightning rod.

Here's the other difference, and perhaps the real reason why a UNC team would be much less likely to get in trouble for this:  in Durham, Duke athletes have almost no chance of getting things brushed under the rug - and that's fine with us, frankly. In Chapel Hill, athletes are much more likely to be indulged than they are in Durham.

Still, "character" didn't save Makhtar Ndaiye, Ed Cota, Terrence Newby, and whatever Marion Jones did or didn't learn in Chapel Hill, it didn't stick.  We can't remember everyone, much less the football players and wrestlers.  And then there's Phil Ford.

When he was arrested in Michigan for a DWI, if UNC didn't put him in rehab, they should have. And if they knew about his DWI there, and allowed him to continue to drive a university car in North Carolina, given his history of alcoholism, his car should have been yanked.  If he didn't tell them about it, he should have been fired; if he did tell them and they let him keep driving, then someone in the athletic department should have been fired.

Frankly, Phil Ford posed a much greater danger to the public than the Duke lacrosse team did. We're glad he got back on the wagon and hope he stays there, but between Makhtar Ndaiye's well-documented lies and slanders after the Final Four loss to Utah,  and how Ford's case was handled by the university, much less the criminal activities by various athletes over the years it's hard for UNC to claim a level of superiority.

Okay, we found this list at Carolinasucks.com. We altered it somewhat, mostly to put the basketball in one place and then to group things roughly by categories, but you can see the original here.

And we're not suggesting Duke's perfect, either.  Off the top of our head, we can think of Alaa Abdelnaby, Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley, and Casey Sanders as guys who had legal issues, and there are probably a few more (old school UNC fans would say don't forget Art Heyman).  But this is a pretty considerable list of charges. Maybe they should have spent more time with Dr. Friday!