UNC professor blasts university and its athletic heroes in defense of Rashad McCants

Jay Smith has had enough of the vilification of Rashad McCants.

Smith, a North Carolina history professor who is co-authoring a book titled "Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports," emailed me Saturday. He was angry about comments he read in my Thursday column from Dean Smith-era Tar Heels who were critical of McCants in the wake of his allegations of academic fraud during his 2002-05 tenure as a basketball player at the school.

McCants produced a transcript for ESPN's "Outside the Lines" showing he had a 4.0 grade-point average during the semester when the Heels were winning the 2005 national title, allegedly despite doing no work. Players from the 1960s and '70s – Richard Vinroot, Bill Chamberlain and David Chadwick – all questioned the credibility of McCants to me.

And Jay Smith, a consistently outspoken critic of North Carolina's athletic department and university leadership during this so-called "Paper Class" academic scandal, wanted to respond to McCants' critics – not only the men quoted in my column, but others who have spoken out in other venues.

"I'm struck by the profiles of those attacking Rashad McCants," Smith wrote in his email to me. "On the one hand, you have old-timers spouting off about their experiences in the 1960s, '70s or early '80s. These people haven't seen the inside of an academic support program in years, even decades. They don't have a clue what the program was like in 2005. Yet they hurl their venom at McCants – a player who had the guts to share his transcript on television, and who also had the guts to buck the tide while he was at UNC [an offense against ‘the family' for which he has never been forgiven].

"On the other hand, you have more current players willfully deceiving gullible journalists – while carefully guarding their transcripts – because they don't want to face reality and deal with the shame that the 'Carolina way' was no more than an illusion during their playing days. Antawn Jamison [who played at North Carolina from 1995-98] has the audacity to call McCants a clown? Someone needs to remind Jamison that [UNC-sanctioned special investigator] Ken Wainstein is actually looking at transcripts. Wainstein knows. And he's going to be issuing a report.

"Other people know, too, including some who are writing books. The truth is eventually going to come out. And we'll see who's wearing the dunce cap when this story is all said and done."...