Joe Nocera, New York Times columnist, visits UNC to talk college athletics, NCAA

Joe Nocera is certainly not a fan of the NCAA.

And he hopes UNC will lead the ACC in discussing change in national athletics — a role administrators say they are willing to accept.

“UNC is at the center. You went through this scandal and learned from it like other schools haven’t,” The New York Times columnist said at a talk on big-time college athletics Wednesday.

“Dialogue is the place to start,” he told a crowd of mostly administrators and faculty members.

Chancellor Holden Thorp said in an interview prior to the event that he agrees that there are things that need to change in college athletics.

“I’m glad Carolina is a place where people are coming together to talk about it,” he said.

Athletic director Bubba Cunningham, who inherited a recovering athletic department when he took office in November, said he agrees.

“I think we should be in this conversation, and we have been,” Cunningham said.

Bill Friday, president of the UNC system from 1956 to 1986 and an unabashed critic of college sports, said conference-wide action is key.

“It’s not so much Chapel Hill as the ACC,” Friday said. “No one can act alone in this business. It will be a conference.

“If our University would take the initiative in the conference to talk about this … that’s what I hope we can do,” he said.

The University is still reeling from the NCAA’s verdict Monday on its football program, which included a one-year bowl ban.

Nocera laid out his problems with the NCAA and collegiate athletics in the talk. His early work focused on paying football and men’s basketball players.

“It’s a $6 billion business in which everyone is getting rich off the back of the unpaid labor force,” he said.

Now, Nocera focuses on the lack of advocates and rights for players.

“Universities should, as a matter of moral justice, make sure the player has an advocate,” he said.

He called for a player’s union to regulate agents for high school students deciding whether to go pro or to a university.

He also focused on the lack of due-process rights for athletes affected by NCAA sanctions.

“You have to sign your rights away to be in the NCAA,” he said.

UNC will not advocate such radical reforms but hopes to remain on the forefront of discussion, officials said.

“I prefer to call it a conversation rather than a reform because I don’t think we’ve gotten to the point yet where we know that these are the precise right steps,” Thorp said.

Cunningham said the NCAA has evolved since its founding in 1906 and must be refined again.

“I don’t want us to think the NCAA is a bad organization because it has changed over time and it needs to change again.”

While no actions are currently planned, Nocera asked UNC administrators and faculty to continue starting discussion.

“Stay on this track and talk about it louder. Now you’re whispering, because you’re still trying to figure it out,” he said.

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