Do you realize the University of Illinois might be this close to a national basketball championship?
“Amid the blue-and-white pompoms,” wrote Powell, “few are so rude as to mention that [UNC] remains enmeshed in a scandal of spectacular proportions. Put simply, for two decades until 2013, the university provided fake classes for many hundreds of student athletes, most of them basketball and football players.”
Imagine if UNC is stripped of all championships tainted by corruption! If that’s the fate of Williams’s 2005 team, the national title it won that year would properly pass to the team it beat in the finals 75-70: the Fighting Illini of Illinois.
The actual reward for the Illini, should UNC be stripped of this championship, wouldn’t be accepting it as a hand-me-down 12 years after the fact. Its reward would be thinking cheater’s proof! and letting it go. Cheater’s proof is always delicious.
