An Apology To UNLV Fans

We got a nice letter from a UNLV fan named Dolores who was unhappy that we’ve been calling UNC UNLV-Chapel Hill.

That’s a joke conflating UNLV’s old reputation as an outlaw school and UNC’s newer status as a bandit athletic program with an epic 18 year academic fraud scandal and a determination not to pay any price at all, other than financial.

But Dolores is right: comparing what UNLV did back in the day, which was at that point a gold standard for cheating, to what UNC did, is indeed an insult to UNLV. In retrospect, Jerry Tarkanian was a piker.

So we’ll retire the UNLV-Chapel Hill schtick and give some thought to a better name. ShoeNC, which Luke DeCock debuted in the N&O the other day following the suspension of several football players the other day for selling their Nike-provided shoes, is good but doesn’t cover the magnitude of the scandal. Plus it kind of infringes on Steve Spurrier’s immortal Free Shoes U crack about Florida State which was much, much funnier.

If you have a good idea, drop us a line and let us know and if it’s good we’ll use it.