Dive Brief:
- A former football player at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is suing the school for allegedly funneling him into bogus courses that never met instead of providing the quality education that his coaches had guaranteed when they recruited him.
- The player, Michael McAdoo, attended UNC starting in 2008, and in 2010 he was ruled ineligible to play because of academic violations, including receiving improper assistance from a tutor on a research paper, Bloomberg reports.
- McAdoo is seeking class action status to represent other former University of North Carolina athletes in his lawsuit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Charlotte, NC.
Dive Insight:
This is just another chapter in the university’s student-athlete sham classes scandal, but it could be a particularly expensive one. McAdoo was enrolled in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies, which the university has admitted was at the center of an 18-year-long coordinated effort to provide artificially high grades, mostly to athletes to keep them eligible for NCAA competition.
About 3,100 students were involved in the scandal, which included so-called paper classes where no class attendance or faculty involvement was required. McAdoo signed with the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens, but never played in a regular season game, and played professional football in Canada.