Who is Rashad McCants talking about besides himself?
So now the disgruntled and unwelcome former Tar Heel has written his own book, or somebody else helped write it for him. “Plantation Education: The Exploitation of the Modern-Day Athlete-Student” tells the same story we’ve been hearing for years and tells it through his own lens of failure at Carolina.
Among the points McCants makes is that athletes should get paid, an argument that’s been growing for years as they still get the academic scholarship and some minor perks while the industry is now a multi-billion-dollar business. It’s a long, uphill climb, in case he hasn’t noticed, with every party fighting to hold on to its piece of the money-making pie. Stay tuned for that one.
Sure, Rashad, some athletes come to college ill-prepared academically — which is far more about the sorry public educational system in this country than anything else. Schools try to help them, and most athletes wind up far better than if they were not admitted and never allowed to play NCAA sports.
Okay, your UNC teammates wouldn’t back you when you went after your coach, athletic department and university? Why should they defend your regrettable behavior and risk everything they’ve worked for and accomplished? “They stood against me in one true moment of need,” McCants writes. Wasn’t it more YOUR true moment of need?
Yep, there was an academic scandal about easy classes, which shouldn’t have happened but does at every other school from Ivy League geology called “Rocks for Jocks” on down. At Carolina, though, they were listed in the catalogue and open to all students who needed help, many not athletes.
Is the NCAA a cartel, which some have claimed including disgraced former learning specialist Mary Willingham, who has the foreword in your book? What a surprise. What did Mary get for it besides a firing and a small settlement that she has already violated many times before what she writes for you.
There is much more, Rashad, including how Roy Williams kept trying to save your failing NBA hoops career, the one you blew on your own. So now you’re an author telling the same stale story.
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