'If Y'all Came Here for an Education, You Should Have Gone to Harvard'

“If y’all came here for an education, you should have gone to Harvard.”

Tydreke Powell maintains that his former football coach Butch Davis said this to him when he entered the University of North Carolina. Powell, who called in to Greensboro, North Carolina, radio station 102 JAMZ, labeled the former coach’s taunt “discouraging.”

Powell described a woman taking tests in a basketball player’s stead, athletes purposefully failing aptitude tests to qualify for special help, and the no-show classes at the center of the scandal. He explained that he turned in a paper for one course but “there wasn’t no class or anything like that.”

A UNC-authorized report issued by former Justice Department official Kenneth Wainstein last month detailed systematic fraud perpetrated by the school’s African and Afro-American Studies Department designed to preserve eligibility for athletes. An earlier report issued by the state’s former governor downplayed malfeasance by the school and its athletic programs. The scheme allegedly started in 1993 and ended in 2009. According to Wainstein, the fraud benefited roughly 3,100 student-athletes, including players on three Tar Heels NCAA basketball champions.

“Man, you know he know,” Powell offered about the school’s basketball coach. “Roy Williams is a snake, man.” 

Powell depicted worldly coaches manipulating all-too willing kids into sacrificing their educations for academic eligibility through phony classes. The fraudulent system, he contends, centered around the Tar Heels basketball team. “If you don’t got a class with a basketball player,” he quipped, “you got to go find one.”