With an investigator's announcement of findings on Wednesday, more luster came off the University of North Carolina's basketball program.
How much it will taint a treasured athletic entity remains to be seen. Will it result in coach Roy Williams' demise? How much of Rashad McCants' allegations will be proved true?
And will the Tar Heels pay with sanctions because of the school's academics scandal?
Kenneth Wainstein, a former high-ranking U.S. Justice Department official, revealed his findingsfrom witnesses and records in the investigation. Findings were provided to university officials last week for review and to the NCAA. One significant finding: Institutional oversight was lacking. Wainstein called it a typical "blind spot" that occurs at even highly successful organizations.
"I think it's very clear that this is an academic, an athletic and a university problem," chancellor Carol Folt said.
Folt said the school has fired or begun disciplinary procedures against nine employees. Names were not immediately available.
MORE: Coach spoke with investigators; McCants didn't
In all, 361 football players and 128 men's basketball players enrolled in no-show classes, Wainstein said. often deliberately steered there by academic counselors to bolster their worrisomely low grade-point averages and to allow them to continue playing on North Carolina's teams.
Previous probes by the NCAA and school officials found problems in the school's Department of African and Afro-American Studies, which was popular with athletes. Wainstein had the cooperation of former department chairman Julius Nyang'oro and retired office administrator Deborah Crowder � the two people blamed for the irregularities.
Nyang'oro was indicted in December on a felony fraud charge, though it was dropped after he agreed to cooperate with Wainstein's probe. Crowder was never charged.
More than 3,100 students were involved in a "shadow" curriculum" that occurred over nearly two decades, according to The Associated Press. Nearly half of them were athletes. Participants didn't have to show up for classes, which required only a research paper that was often given an A or B regardless of the quality of work.
Participants included athletes from other UNC teams as well as basketball players. In football, the instance of academic fraud stretched back into the coaching tenures of Mack Brown and Butch Davis. As for the basketball program, the scandal's roots were traced to the Dean Smith era.
A 2012 probe by former Gov. Jim Martin placed no blame on the school's athletic department, but shortcomings were later discovered in the report.
Wainstein's revelations followed closed-door meetings by the school's board of trustees and the board that oversees the state's university system.
Roy Williams (Getty Images)
In June, McCants described how tutors wrote papers for him and he took sham classes. A player for the Tar Heels' 2005 NCAA champion team, McCants was reportedly a part of a "paper-class system."Williams denied knowledge of academic fraud.
McCants didn't respond to requests to be interviewed, Wainstein said. As a result, there was no evidence to support McCants' claims.
The university issued what is known as a non-denial denial, an admission of knowing what McCants said without saying his statements were false.
The university self-reported to the NCAA in 2011 when officials became aware of questions about the classes, Wainstein said. Its actions after 18 years of classes was appropriate, according to Wainstein in his Wednesday comments.
It was Crowder who started the paper classes as a way to help struggling students with "watered-down requirements" not long after Nyang'oro became chairman of the curriculum in 1992, according to the report. Though not a faculty member, she managed the courses by registering students, assigning them topics and then handing out high grades regardless of the work.
By 1999, in an apparent effort to work around the number of independent studies students could take, Crowder began offering lecture classes that didn't meet and were instead paper classes.
After her retirement in 2009, Nyang'oro graded papers "with an eye to boosting" a student's grade-point average, even asking Crowder's successor to look up GPAs before he'd issue a grade for a course, according to the report.
Nyang'oro stepped down in 2011 as chairman after accusations of undetected plagiarism surfaced against a former football player.
In all, athletes made up about 47 percent of the enrollments in the 188 lecture-classified paper classes. Of that group, 51 percent were football players.
"Even though I've heard it before I know just how hard it is to hear [Wainstein's] report," Folt said Wednesday. "What you have found is very painful but you have done the university a great service."
Taking responsibility for the resolving the university's, Folt said: "Wrongdoing could and should have been stopped much earlier by individuals in positions of influence and oversight. We now have a full understanding of what happened and the important point going forward is how we are we going to act."
Many at the university hoped Wainstein's investigation would bring closure to the long-running scandal, which is rooted in an NCAA investigation focused on improper benefits within the football program in 2010. Instead, findings of a systemic problem could lead to NCAA sanctions and possible dismissal of additional UNC staff.
A half-dozen officials and UNC athletics director Bubba Cunningham declined to say whether anyone would lose their job, according to AP.
Wednesday was another step in the process. The endgame awaits.
