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SEC Sports
There was something all too familiar about both the tone and the substance of N.C. State’s latest exchange of volleys with the NCAA on Wednesday, equal parts aggrieved and outraged. It had the distinct timbre of the correspondence between North Carolina and the NCAA in the later phases of its infractions case, where even the most basic matters were grounds for contention.
That’s no coincidence.
North Carolina may not have invented this playbook, but it used it most effectively to avoid any NCAA sanctions for decades of academic fraud — in direct contrast to its stance during the football scandal that preceded it and spawned a much larger investigation, when North Carolina attempted assiduously to cooperate with the NCAA and got slapped around for its troubles.
Those lessons loom large now as N.C. State deals with the fallout of Dennis Smith Jr.’s recruitment and the alleged misdeeds of the Mark Gottfried era, the university counseled by the same law firm that so deftly turned the NCAA’s own rules and procedures against it in the North Carolina case, Bond, Schoeneck & King.
But not only them.
N.C. State’s filing was signed by, among others, former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, one of several litigators from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; and Anne Tompkins, the former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, now with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, the firm that conducted the Wainstein investigation for UNC.
These are big legal guns from big firms, with big reputations and even bigger hourly fees. This kind of legal firepower isn’t cheap: North Carolina spent $21 million defending itself during the two-year period from 2016-18.
“We have retained additional counsel,” an N.C. State spokesman said in an email Thursday, a candidate for understatement of the week.
After initially playing along with the NCAA and accepting responsibility for a series of boneheaded administrative errors that amounted to minor violations, the argument over the more significant allegations surrounding Smith, Gottfried and Orlando Early have exploded into the public domain. The university’s filing is full of rebukes and remonstration for that.
“Now, despite N.C. State’s efforts, the (committee on infractions) asserts that because the University does not agree in totality with its factual allegations or the application of the new importation of facts bylaw, N.C. State has engaged in ‘adversarial posturing,’” the filing reads in part.
As N.C. State “reluctantly” accepted referral to the NCAA’s new independent resolution process, it left a trail of legal land mines behind, implying the NCAA’s infractions committee acted out of gross negligence or bad faith or a combination thereof, perhaps irreparably so: “The COI may have tainted the adjudication of this case.”
It even questioned the NCAA’s own actions in setting up the independent panel, noting how it ignored the recommendations of the Rice Commission and, according to N.C. State, omitted critical safeguards for the schools.
The filing sets up a series of legal hurdles that the NCAA will now have to clear, forcing it to defend itself against accusations of unfair treatment, the application of its own bylaws and a lack of due process, before it ever gets around to actually arguing matters of fact.
There was a time when the NCAA bureaucracy and its lawyers could lean heavily on schools to get its way. North Carolina, having fallen for that once, demonstrated the NCAA could be out-lawyered. N.C. State, having tried to play nice at the beginning of this infractions case, is now following its rival’s litigious example.
