UNC “Fans” Go From Indifferent To Angry To Dangerous Over Tez Walker Situation
Death Threats? Seriously?
As the antics over at UNLV-Chapel Hill heat up due to the Tez Walker situation, the NCAA is reporting that some committee members are now getting death threats.
And the cartel is blaming UNC football coach Mack Brown and his boss, A.D. Bubba Cunningham, for fanning the baby blue loons. This is from a statement by Division I chairman Jere Morehead (president of the University of Georgia) and vice chairman Christopher Pietruszkiewicz (president of Evansville).
“Those comments directly contradict what we and our fellow Division I members and coaches called for vociferously - including UNC’s own football coach. We are a membership organization, and rather than pursue a public relations campaign that can contribute to a charged environment for our peers who volunteer on committees, we encourage members to use established and agreed-upon procedures to voice concerns and propose and adopt rule or policy changes if they are dissatisfied.”
This means back to the Department of Redundancy Depart of yore, but there’s a bigger point.
You can think that the NCAA is hypocritical, as Jay Bilas has argued for many years now. You can think that the NCAA is using the Walker situation to stick it to UNC over how it escaped the recent academic fraud scandal from with no real consequences - other than reputationally - as we have argued. You can even agree that Walker is being treated unfairly, something that we basically agree with as most of you probably do as well, if you’re being honest. We have no beef with Walker whatsoever.
But no matter how you argue it, the NCAA is ultimately made up of the member institutions and they decide how things will operate. It’s not as if the cartel is some outside agency that imposes mandates on the members. The members do that to themselves!
That aside, if death threats are now being made, it would be a good time for Brown and Cunningham to step up and calm the waters. Even though the UNC bigwigs have a rational objection, their behavior is counterproductive and it’s possible that some idiot might decide to “help.”
It’s time to take this pot off the stove.