Sporting News

UNC academic scandal: Roy Williams spoke with investigators; Rashad McCants did not

North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams and former UNC coach Matt Doherty both spoke with investigators looking into academic fraud centered around African-American (AFAM) Studies paper classes offered by the university.

But Rashad McCants — an outspoken player except when investigators came calling — did not cooperate.

Roy Williams (Getty Images)

MORE: From Mack Brown to Butch Davis | Wide-ranging probe | The complete report

The AFAM classes were offered as far back as during Dean Smith’s tenure, but Smith and his successor, Bill Guthridge, were not available to speak to investigators because of health reasons.

Among the findings:

— 54 basketball player enrollments* in AFAM classes while Smith was head coach.

— 17 enrollments while Guthridge was head coach from 1997 to 2000.

— 42 enrollments in paper classes from 2000 to 2003 when Doherty was coach.

— 167 player enrollments since 2003 when Williams took over the program.

(* Player enrollments is not an indication of the number of individual players who took one of the classes. Enrollment indicates the number of classes taken by players under each coach because some players may have taken more than one of the classes.)

Doherty told investigators he inherited the academic support system developed by Smith and Guthridge and was advised by both to not change it.

He said he met with his players at the beginning and end of the season to discuss their academics. He was aware that players were taking AFAM classes and “it was his understanding that AFAM was the easiest major at Chapel Hill, and that the AFAM professors were particularly athlete-friendly with class demands and scheduling.”

But Doherty said that he had no reason to doubt that the classes were legitimate.

When Williams, a former assistant under Smith at UNC, returned to Chapel Hill in 2003, he brought assistant coach Joe Holladay and academic counselor Wayne Walden from Kansas. Holladay and Walden managed academic oversight for the basketball team.

All three spoke with investigators and said they inherited a team that was mostly majoring in AFAM. Five of 15 players on the 2003-04 team and 10 of the 15 on the 2005 team were majoring in AFAM.

According to the report, Williams was not comfortable with that “clustering” in the AFAM major and “after a year or two on the job he asked Holladay to make sure that basketball and ASPSA personnel were not steering players to the AFAM Department.”

In June, McCants told ESPN that tutors wrote papers for him while he was at UNC and that he took bogus classes.

McCants was the Tar Heels’ second-leading scorer on the 2005 team that won the national championship. He had a short NBA career, playing parts of four seasons in Minnesota and Sacramento, averaging 10.0 points in 249 games.

McCants said in that June interview that Williams was aware of the paper class system and that he would swap a class to prevent eligibility issues for McCants.

McCants refused multiple requests to be interviewed for the investigation. Seven of his teammates said that players took the AFAM classes because they were easy but denied “anything fraudulent about them or that tutors had drafted papers for them or others.”

Williams denied telling McCants that he would swap classes for him.

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