Tennessee basketball: Bruce Pearl and NCAA's hypocrisy with Vols, UNC

Former Tennessee basketball coach Bruce Pearl and the Volunteers suffered far more from the NCAA for much less than the North Carolina Tar Heels.

Let’s run through this again, as we always seem to have to do. Bruce Pearl hosted a barbecue at his house while head coach of Tennessee basketball back in 2008. At the time he had a couple of recruits there, one of whom was eventual commitment Jordan McRae.

Pearl took a photo with Aaron Craft, another recruit. He apparently acknowledged this was a violation and later lied about it to the NCAA.

As a result of that lie, the NCAA hit him with a three-year show-cause penalty and Tennessee basketball, under the ineptitude of Mike Hamilton, fired Pearl under pressure.

By the way, that’s not even a violation anymore.

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So the NCAA’s reaction to a lie about a secondary violation that it doesn’t even consider a violation anymore killed the Vols’ basketball program and significantly hampered Pearl’s career.

Meanwhile, across state lines and on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains, something far worse appeared to be taking place.

The North Carolina Tar Heels were allegedly running an academic fraud scheme. And nobody got a punishment from it.

The NCAA could have potentially leaned on the fact that they had no evidence of wrongdoing. But that’s not what their final report said.

As ESPN reporter Myron Medcalf noted, athletes at UNC were able to secure good grades in courses with very little effort. UNC shifted its position on whether or not academic fraud occurred there.

But because those courses were available to all students, they couldn’t conclude there was a violation.

Now, let’s break this all down.

Apparently a school can create sham courses to boost athletes’ grades so they can play. But a coach can’t have a barbecue with recruits? Isn’t one violation significantly greater than the other?

This double-standard that destroyed the Tennessee basketball program is blatant hypocrisy.

Again, yes, Pearl lied to the NCAA. But UNC changed its position on whether or not academic fraud occurred. That’s basically a lie.

And Pearl lied about a violation the NCAA doesn’t even consider a violation anymore anyway!

Now, to be fair, I actually have no problem with what UNC did. We all know that the basketball stars there went to play basketball. I’ve always laughed at the term student-athlete.

And it is more of a school issue than anything else if they’re creating easy courses for everybody so their athletes can pass.

That’s why we never said the NCAA was unfair to Donnie Tyndall, who was involved in a much more serious scandal that allegedly had people doing the coursework for the players.

But with the way the NCAA came down on Pearl over a barbecue with recruits, this seems terribly hypocritical. Regardless, the organization just opened Pandora’s Box.

Now, you’re going to have a host of schools that commit what should be violations but find ways around them. At some point, we’re just going to have to accept that these guys aren’t really student athletes. They’re valuable commodities that schools have huge investments in. Just don’t have a barbecue with them.

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Tennessee basketball: Bruce Pearl and the NCAA’s hypocrisy with Vols, UNC

By Caleb Calhoun | Oct 13, 2017

Former Tennessee basketball coach Bruce Pearl and the Volunteers suffered far more from the NCAA for much less than the North Carolina Tar Heels.