After reading the long-awaited Notice of Allegations, one has to wonder what took the NCAA so damn long.

Sure, UNC has to treat it with the utmost respect because at the end of this endless journey, eight hardly impartial randomly picked peers from a pool of 24 will make up the Committee of Infractions and mete out penalties. And some may be from schools and conferences with an ax to grind toward Carolina.

With all the push and pull still to come, it can’t be a win-lose outcome. Penn State lost and then had to sue to win its appeal. It would be far better if both sides could negotiate a win-win.

As bad as Carolina was at handling the first set-to with the NC-2-A, this time it has an excellent (and expensive) legal team led by strong in-house attorneys. Surely, they think that 44 of the NOA’s 55 pages aren’t worth the paper they are printed on because they come directly from the ill-advised Wainstein Report. The NCAA received its own bound copy.

Email from Boxill to Crowder . . .includes, but not limited to . . . something or another about classes and grades in the AFAM department.

Some serious stuff, sure. But if UNC gets severely nailed on any of this, whoever was responsible for commissioning the Wainstein Report, long after the problems were found and fixed, needs to pack up and leave town. How about spending three-and-a-half million dollars of your own money to re-open a case that was closed. To use a sports cliché, there was a lack of savvy from the people in charge thinking Wainstein would end all this. Instead, he threw kerosene on a fire that was just about out.

If any coaches get fired, they would have been fired anyway from our own internal investigation. We had already connected enough dots to know what happened, how and where it went wrong and were implementing the 70 or so reforms listed on the Carolina Commitment website. We had all the emails before Wainstein and the NCAA got them.

Allegations No. 1 and No. 2 are Level 1 allegations because, well, the NCAA says they are. If it weren’t a high-profile university, upon which the credibility of the NCAA hangs, would any other school draw Level 1s on academic advisors steering athletes into easy classes? And would it be stretched into No. 2 by calling it unethical conduct? The NCAA bylaws say you MUST have academic advisors to help the student-athletes. The fine line here is pretty darn fine.

Carolina should refute those charges vigorously.

UNC gets Allegations No. 3 and 4 because Julius Nyang’oro and Deborah Crowder refused to speak to the NCAA? They wouldn’t speak to us, either! Look at the Wainstein Report, suits. It’s all there in black and white after they got their immunity deal. Not like the university was trying to muzzle this duo.

And No. 5, lack of institutional control, is an egregious offense, the highest charge the NCAA hands out. But, in this case, it wasn’t failing to control what happened exclusively with athletics. It was an academic free for all that athletes took advantage of but also Greeks and geeks all over campus. So that fine could be stiff but has no bearing on the athletic department. Yes, Doctors Margolis and Smith, we had a relatively few athletes taking easy courses that kept them eligible; welcome to Division 1.

Worth worrying about did not happen.

As expected, Roy Williams and Larry Fedora were not named in the NOA and neither were any of their players beyond taking classes over which the NCAA has no jurisdiction. No coaches cheated (a la Syracuse) and no real academic improprieties were uncovered. The NCAA has been investigating this for so long that despite saying much of it was out of its purview something had to be alleged. How about a Notice that pretty much plagiarizes the Wainstein Report?

The media frenzy will continue with some shock jocks still crowing about Carolina sitting out the 2016 NCAA Tournament and missing another bowl game. If those sanctions ever happen, and they are rare after the Penn State debacle, the NCAA has to have ruled that an ineligible player was used or some serious cheating occurred.  None of that is in the NOA.

Syracuse, by contrast, was charged with the basketball office being directly involved in writing term papers and facilitating illegal gifts to players, plus blowing drug test procedures and not promoting an atmosphere of compliance. The Orange lost a dozen scholarships, must vacate a bunch of victories and coach Jim Boeheim was suspended for nine ACC games (which he is appealing). But no post-season sanctions beyond what the school self-imposed last season.

Six-to-nine months from now, UNC may get a sizable fine. Whatever penalties come to athletics, the price won’t be close to what it cost Syracuse or, for that matter, what certain Tar Heel teams have already paid over the interminable last two years. Hang on, it’s almost over.