Roy Williams is just the latest to keep himself in the dark

North Carolina coach Roy Williams was not directly implicated.

That's the basketball headline, I guess.

And it's a headline that suggests the Hall of Famer will survive what is now undeniably an embarrassing academic scandal so wide-ranging that more than 3,000 students benefited -- although, in the long run, those students probably didn't benefit at all. Either way, roughly 50 percent of the students were athletes. And many of those were basketball players.

Still, Roy Williams was not directly implicated.

That's the basketball headline, I guess.

But the independent report made available to the public Wednesday does detail how Williams eventually acknowledged to investigators that, yes, he had early suspicions about his players' heavy use of classes in the Afro-American Studies Department, which was littered with paper courses. And that proves, at least in my mind, that what Williams did here is essentially the same thing so many other high-profile coaches have done in similarly sketchy situations for decades and decades, i.e., table suspicions of improper behavior, at least temporarily, in the spirit of wins and protecting the brand.

To believe otherwise is silly.

Just like Joe Paterno was never too interested in exposing Jerry Sandusky at Penn State, and Jim Tressel was never too interested in finding out how his players got all those tattoos at Ohio State, and Jim Calhoun was never too interested in the reality that one of his top recruits at Connecticut had an established relationship with a former UConn manager turned agent, Roy Williams wasn't initially too interested in taking the obvious steps to find out if the majority of the players on his 2005 national title team (and others throughout his tenure) were being guided into fraudulent classes to ensure eligibility.

Why wasn't he initially interested, you ask?

Because, quite simply, it was better if he didn't know.

And this is the way high-major college athletics have been for a while.

To be clear, I would never suggest what went on for 18 years at North Carolina goes on everywhere, or even most places; this is an extreme and almost unbelievable situation. My only point is that the way Williams handled it is consistent with how other high-profile coaches have handled similar situations. He asked just enough questions so that he could say he asked some questions, then turned his head, covered his ears and coached his team.

If Williams was truly interested in squashing academic fraud as quickly as possible, he could've. But he was more interested in having Rashad McCants eligible than trying to get to the bottom of McCants' great grades, and, honestly, I'm not sure I blame him.

That's the twist here.

On one hand, I'm telling you Roy Williams was wrong.

But, on the other, what I'm also telling you is that I sorta understand.

Coaches have forever talked about molding young people into men, preparing them for life after basketball, and blah, blah, blah. But the truth is that the majority understand they are paid millions of dollars to win games, and so they do what they have to do to win games, and who cares if a student might be in a class that's too easy or even nonexistent?

"I'm just a coach," they might say to themselves. "It's not my job to catch academic fraud. We have academic people for that. So if everybody else is OK with what's going on, who am I to take a stand? And, even if I did take a stand, I'd only be hurting myself and my program, and, well, what time is practice this afternoon? Where's my whistle?"

Surely you can see the incentive for somebody like Williams to look away.

If not, let me spell it out of you.

The incentive is national championships and stacks of money.

Again, I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying I totally get how and why this stuff can and does happen. And, ultimately, this is the central problem with tying multimillion-dollar sports teams to institutions of higher-learning. The missions often run counter to each other, and when folks on the academic side are compelled to cater, for whatever reason, to folks on the athletic side, well, that's basically how North Carolina reached this point.