Home Carolina took care of Coach K: Still one more job to do tonight
UVA Basketball

Carolina took care of Coach K: Still one more job to do tonight

Chris Graham

2022 ncaa tournamentNorth Carolina ruined two Coach K lovefests. The Tar Heels aren’t done doing good deeds for college basketball; now they need to save us from Bill Self.

If most of us (outside of Durham and a few precincts in New Jersey) didn’t want to see Mike Krzyzewski hoisting the big trophy as the final gift on his this is all about me retirement tour, Self, still facing five Level I NCAA allegations, absolutely cannot get his hands on it.

Bill Self is everything that is dirty and seedy and effed up about college sports.

He’s bagmen on wiretaps promising him players, then denying it, even when we see it and hear it for ourselves, in federal court, thanks to the wiretaps.

People went to jail for their parts in the Adidas scandal; Self is in the national championship game, 40 minutes from adding to the trophy case at KU, which is so ashamed of what went down that it sued a former Adidas exec claiming itself to be a victim of fraud, and settled for low six figures.

All Coach K did was hypocritically cycle through an endless series of one-year players in pursuit of championships for the past decade.

Funny note there: he won more national titles (4) with four-year players than he did with one-and-dones (1, and done).

He may have dragged the academic reputation of Duke University (yes, there are schools attached to these athletics programs), but whatever.

Kansas had no Duke-level pretense to hold it back from going far beyond just having one-and-dones. KU is a decent football program away from being SEC, when you get down to it.

North Carolina, to be fair, has blood on its hands. I’m not dismissing the Afro-American Studies scandal that landed the school on probation not by the NCAA, because the NCAA is smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds it, but rather by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, its academic accrediting agency.

Just weighing things here, easy class credits vs. wiretapped bagmen …

Hey, didja see that South Carolina-UConn game last night?

Story by Chris Graham

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Chris Graham

Chris Graham

Chris Graham is the founder and editor of Augusta Free Press. A 1994 alum of the University of Virginia, Chris is the author and co-author of seven books, including Poverty of Imagination, a memoir published in 2019. For his commentaries on news, sports and politics, go to his YouTube page, TikTok, BlueSky, or subscribe to his Street Knowledge podcast. Email Chris at [email protected].

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