One week from Wednesday, North Carolina football coach Larry Fedora will be in Nashville, Tenn., to appear at UNC’s long-awaited hearing with the NCAA Committee on Infractions. It is not a trip, necessarily, that Fedora wanted to make during the middle of his team’s preseason.
“I knew it was a possibility,” he said recently. “You can look at every case across the country, and whoever’s in charge of football, whoever’s in charge of basketball – you know, they’re always there. I had a feeling. I was hoping it wouldn’t, but that’s just the way it happened.”
The university’s appearance before the infractions committee is essentially its trial date after a three-year NCAA investigation into how suspect African Studies courses benefited athletes, notably men’s basketball and football players, between 2002 and 2011.