This post was originally published on the author’s blog Coaching the Mind. Butch Davis was UNC’s first scapegoat in the AFAM paper-class scandal. Davis began coaching at UNC in 2006 and was fired in the summer of 2011, soon after suspicions about Julius Nyang’oro’s classes surfaced. UNC’s first investigation, conducted the following year by two A&S senior-level deans, was limited, without good reason, to the years 2007 – 2011. During my interview with Davis for my documentary, he explained, “It was like everybody wanted it to just be about my tenure. It was just going to be about football. Maybe at the end, we can tie this up in a nice little bow, and it will be, we’ll fire the head coach, we’ll blame it all on the football program, we’ll kick it to the curb, and we’ll be able to move on.” Davis’s firing and that first investigation reveal much about UNC’s priorities, though few have been perceptive enough to see that. What UNC’s most strident critics fail to understand about the University is that its academic prestige, reflected by its status as a Top 5 public university, is far more important than its national championships in sports. Even more important, on a practical level, is the school’s accreditation. A school can persist after losing its championships: it cannot persist after losing its accreditation. Thus, over the past five years...
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