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North Carolina Tar Heels: Wallace Loh of UMD takes a shot

By John Woodcock

Feb 13, 2016; College Park, MD, USA; Maryland Terrapins school president Wallace Loh speaks during a panel celebrating the Texas Westerns 50th anniversary of their 1966 mens basketball national championship before the game against the Wisconsin Badgers at Xfinity Center. Mandatory Credit: Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports
Feb 13, 2016; College Park, MD, USA; Maryland Terrapins school president Wallace Loh speaks during a panel celebrating the Texas Westerns 50th anniversary of their 1966 mens basketball national championship before the game against the Wisconsin Badgers at Xfinity Center. Mandatory Credit: Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports /
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The North Carolina Tar Heels got brought back into scandal discussion again by the President of the University of Maryland.

The North Carolina Tar Heels scandal story had grown kind of quiet lately, well as quiet as one could get. The media did ask Coach Roy Williams about it at the National Championship press conference, but mostly things have been hiding in the background through with each new or revised letter of allegations pushing back the final reckoning further and further.

Fascinatingly, there is one person willing to talk about what should happen to the school and its athletics programs. That person would be the President of the University of Maryland Wallace Loh. Loh essentially said that the school should receive the death penalty. These comments were made to the senate of the University of Maryland according to reports from Andrew Carter of the Raleigh News and Observer.

The comments were prompted by a question about how to keep athletics from corrupting the rest of a university. Loh took the opportunity to point at Chapel Hill. Perhaps he should have stayed closer to home. The University of Maryland is now part of the Big Ten, and its reasons for being associated with the Big Ten come down to money. The school needed money and used a sports portfolio to get it. What greater example of the potential corruption of athletics into the university would there be than that?

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Maryland did have some hard times under Athletic Director Debbie Yow (now at NC State), but the need to move to the Big Ten was not their only option. They could simply have reduced the profile of their sports teams until the coffers could afford them. They did not want to do that, as I imagine no one would. However fixing a leaky bucket by shoving more water into it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The Maryland problem was fixed by ditching Yow, no matter what conference the team was in.

So Loh can argue to have succeeded only by making his school MORE dependent on athletic money. This would naturally bring a higher danger of corruption. No, let’s point the finger at North Carolina instead because it’s a distraction.

Loh’s argument essentially becomes ‘we aren’t that bad’ while not really explaining what he is talking about. Why mention UNC? They won a national title in basketball, something Maryland has not gotten around to since 2002. They are from the ACC, Maryland’s old conference.  But now the Maryland president can pass judgment as them being beneath him.

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Loh is walking down a slippery slope here. Widespread use of the NCAA death penalty is not common precisely because the NCAA did not like what happened in the wake of its use against SMU in the late 1980s. His standard, as high handed as it sounds, might result in more death penalty cases including against Maryland for some unknown wrong in the future.

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