UNC To Name Court For Roy Williams, Again Honor Illegitimate Accomplishments

If you haven’t heard, UNC is set to honor Roy Williams this weekend by naming the court after him.

Look, Ol’ Roy is clearly a gifted coach which he really proved through the scandal years when recruiting was really knocked sideways. Of all his coaching accomplishments, keeping UNC highly competitive at that time was probably his greatest.

Since returning to UNC, he’s won three national championships and had a high level of success - on the court.

Off the court is a very different matter.

The 2005 and 2009 national titles, for which he’s partly being honored, were won with players who not only took paper classes later proved to be fraudulent, but with numerous guys who actually majored in AFAM. The NCAA didn’t strip them but UNC should have. Instead, it defended them and now it continues to thumb its nose at academic integrity and will happily celebrated the ill-gotten titles.

Therefore we have a suggestion for anyone who is interested and that’s this: whenever the Roy Williams court is mentioned it should be mentioned thusly: Roy Williams Court*

The asterisk can go at the end to remind people that about half of Williams’s UNC success came through rampant cheating and exploitation of athletes, all of which the university continues to celebrate.

And on a random side note, while we don’t wish to get into the Silent Sam controversy, we’d like to make two points to UNC and Orange County for the sake of consistency.

First, as we have mentioned several times, there is strong evidence that the term Tar Heels is a term from the Civil War which was meant to honor Confederate soldiers from North Carolina. It’s bizarre to tear down one symbol of white supremacy and proudly wear another on your T-shirts.

And secondly, since Silent Sam became such an issue what about the town of Carrboro?

The statue was dedicated by Julian Carr, who by any definition, including his own, was a white supremacist. His Wikipedia page says this about the dedication of Silent Sam: “Carr bragged of personally horse-whipping an African American woman ‘until her skirts hung in shreds’ because, according to him, she ‘publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady’ and stated that he found this act a ‘pleasing duty.’”

Both names are legacies of a truly ugly past and UNC and Carrboro, which is essentially part of Chapel Hill, should seriously consider changing them.