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Julius Peppers lost the battle but won the war.
It is so appropriate that Peppers, the two-sport star at Carolina, will be inducted into the National Football Foundation (NFF) College Football Hall of fame on December 10 in Las Vegas, where longest shots sometimes win the jackpot.
It is also apropos that the announcement came this week, when the Tar Heels play at N.C. State in basketball, the other sport Peppers starred in after Ed Cota and teammates begged Bill Guthridge to give him a tryout to provide the Tar Heels with extra rebounding during the 2000 season.
Peppers and fellow two-sport star Ronald Curry helped Guthridge’s last UNC team shock the hoops world, marching from a No. 8 seed in the NCAA tournament to the Final Four in Indianapolis before losing to Florida in the Saturday semifinals. In 2001, Peppers and Curry also were prominent in Coach Matt Doherty’s first season, when the Tar Heels won 18 straight games, beat Duke in Durham and rose to No. 1 in the rankings before fading down the stretch.
Peppers was a two-time All-ACC football player and unanimous All-American as a junior in 2001 and was the second pick in the NFL draft by the Carolina Panthers. He was Defensive Rookie of the Year in 2002 and went on to be a seven-time All-Pro, also playing for the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers before returning to Charlotte for his last two seasons.
If you have driven east to Wilson, North Carolina, you passed through the rural hamlets of Middlesex, Bailey and Sims, where Peppers grew up and attended deprived public schools. Going to college and becoming one of the greatest players in Carolina and NFL history, Peppers’ net worth is now an estimated $60 million.
If well-documented and overdone reports about his academic struggles at UNC, highly publicized by the Pack Pride fan forum, had led to Peppers flunking out, he might be living back in Nash County today instead of in Charlotte, where he has been very generous with his wealth and some of it going to his alma mater.
Yes, the AFAM academic-athletics scandal at Carolina remains a blight on the university and, hopefully, has since been corrected. But it begs the question of where would Julius Peppers be today if he hadn’t played college football?
We can debate forever whether that investigation, which led to no NCAA sanctions, was worth ending the careers of some players who were caught up in it. But it is also a story of how underserved athletes (and other students) get a chance in life that they never would have had without some extra help.
Featured image via ACC Digital Network
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