Note: Art Chansky is gone for a few days, so digital content manager Dakota Moyer will be contributing for the Sports Notebook in his absence.
Will Carolina football be able to replace the player suspended for Shoe-gate?
This is Dakota with Tuesday’s sports notebook.
UNC announced on Monday that 13 players would be facing suspension for selling team issues shoes, a secondary NCAA violation.
Those suspended include quarterback Chazz Surratt, defensive end Malik Carney, linebacker Malik Robinson and defensive back Tre Shaw among others. Of those names, only Surratt and Carney were starters, but the rest are valuable backups to the team.
So what does this mean for Carolina heading into the 2018 season?
For one, Larry Fedora confirmed that junior Nathan Elliott is his starting quarterback. With Surratt suspended four games, Elliott will likely get first team reps from here on out as the team prepares for a trip to California to begin the season.
The beginning of the season is also where Carolina might face some difficulties. The team travels to Cal, a non-conference opponent that hasn’t always played well but could give UNC trouble in the first game.
After a trip to East Carolina, which should be a winnable game, Carolina returns home to play UCF, who went undefeated last season. Don’t think that losing Scott Frost makes them a worse team, the Golden Knights can absolutely come into Chapel Hill and win this game.
Pittsburgh will be the last game for the suspended players. Pitt had a down year last season, but only narrowly lost to Carolina. They’re coming to Chapel Hill looking for revenge.
Do the suspensions cause you to change your predictions for the first four games? Maybe. If you had the team going 3-1 during that stretch, it might be realistic to change that to 2-2. There’s no way of predicting how this team will respond to this latest form of adversity heading into the season.
The long-term ramifications of this latest NCAA scandal are hard to predict right now. As the flagship Jordan brand school, UNC athletics will undoubtedly receive more and more apparel in the future.
What does it mean that these players valued the cash compensation more than the exclusive Jordan brand shoes? These shoes that boosters and shoe-fanatics would do anything for?
That might be a sports notebook for another day.
O.K. My rant for today. Let me, once again, publicly, express my enmity toward Holden Thorpe for unilaterally firing Butch Davis, who was not shown to have done anything wrong or knew of wrongdoing by his assistant. But, because he was the head coach, he was deemed responsible. By that same standard, this “shoe mess” is the fault of Larry Fedora and the same standard should apply. UNC football was becoming a factor again with Butch and you threw him under the bus. Fedora? Well……..