Two former student athletes from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) have sued the NCAA and UNC for making them “victims of one of the largest academic scandals in college sports history,” according to their attorneys.
Rashanda McCants, a former women’s basketball player, and Devon Ramsay, who played on the school’s football team, hope to be joined by other current and former scholarship athletes as part of a class action lawsuit.
They specifically allege in North Carolina state court that for 20 years, UNC and the NCAA “stood idly by as hundreds of men’s and women’s college athletes were steered into sham classes that lacked faculty involvement or attendance requirements, all for the sake of maintaining their eligibility to perform in athletic competition, while maximizing their time on the field and on the court.”
The suit involves, among other things, negligence claims against the NCAA and breach-of-contract claims against UNC for their roles in the aforementioned “scandal.”
The plaintiffs are represented by Michael D. Hausfeld, Sathya S. Gosselin, Jeannine M. Kenney, and Swathi Bojedla of Hausfeld. Their co-counsel includes former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Robert F. Orr and Harvard Law School professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.
Ramsay issued the following statement: “This suit isn’t just about myself or Ms. McCants, it’s about protecting an opportunity that these young men and women have earned from their dedication and hard work. The athletic scholarship they’ve received promises an education in exchange for athletic participation and enrollment, but what happens when their college or university offers a class that is not legitimate by the university’s own standards?”
The plaintiffs maintained that the problem doesn’t rest solely in North Carolina, claiming that it is “a national problem, one that continually surfaces at some of the most prestigious programs in the country.” They further claim that the NCAA has an obligation “to protect … student athletes.”
McCants added that she wants “all athletes to stand with (them).”
“My intention is for people to know that I did everything that was asked of me, on the court and off the court,” she said. “But the university and the NCAA failed to keep their promise to me and other college athletes, and in turn we seek justice.”
Hausfeld said the suit “not only focuses on the specific fraud at UNC,” but goes far beyond the school. “(It is) an integral, foreseeable part of the entire enterprise of big-time contemporary college athletics, in which academics is truly the stepchild to athletics.” Further, “the meaningful education that the NCAA promises and commits to is nothing more than an illusion.”
The lawsuit elaborates on where the plaintiffs believes the NCAA went astray: “It had ample warning, including empirical evidence from numerous academic experts, that many college athletes were not receiving a meaningful education, including – disproportionally – African-American college athletes in revenue-producing sports. Although the NCAA’s rules prohibit academic fraud, the NCAA knew of dozens of instances of academic fraud in its member schools’ athletic programs over the last century, and it nevertheless refused to implement adequate monitoring systems to detect and prevent these occurrences as its member institutions.”
