More bad news for the ABC crowd.

Those who love to hate UNC and its athletic program received another dose of reality Thursday when the university came off its probation handed down by the Southern Association of Colleges, whose cumbersome complete name goes by the acronym of SACS. This must be a real bummer for those people who have reveled in Carolina’s pain of the last five years, another sign that the academic and athletic scandal is finally coming to a close. Trust me, there is no glee in Raleigh.

Officials from SACS came to campus before its semi-annual meeting, and it was apparent to anyone who studied the situation that UNC would be cleared. More than 70 reforms had been made BEFORE the ill-advised Wainstein Report brought the NCAA back to Chapel Hill and, ultimately, led to the SACS probation. But UNC double-downed on its effort to show the world that the AFAM scandal was a small subset of the university and that, in fact, Carolina is closer to having a model academic system than most of the colleges in the South.

The News & Observer advanced the SACS visit last Sunday by rehashing the scandal and spent too much of the story posing the possibility that UNC would lose its accreditation altogether. If the N&O had done proper reportage, it would have focused on all the reforms published on UNC’s new ethics and integrity website and forecasted that the probation period was ending. Instead, it said pick one: Carolina is cleared, the probation remains for at least another year or the school’s accreditation would be stripped completely, which was a virtual impossibility. Typical sensationalism.

The next bit of “bad” news will be when the NCAA Committee on Infractions finally rules in a next few months. The recently amended Notice of Allegations portends what will happen there, too: a hefty and deserved fine for the university citing a lack of monitoring and oversight; NCAA probation for women’s basketball and something for the rest of the athletic program that will be insignificant and lift the cloud that has hovered since 2011.

Hear for the sound? It’s the ABC crowd baying at the moon.

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