Rashad McCants Vs. Roy Williams: UNC Coach Denies Academic Allegations

Roy Williams does not see eye-to-eye with his former superstar shooting guard Rashad McCants.

The UNC head coach made it publicly known that he strongly denies the allegations brought forth by Rashad McCants in a recent Outside The Lines story on ESPN.

According to The Charlotte Observer, Roy Williams made the following statement:

“I strongly disagree with what Rashad (McCants) has said. In no way did I know about or do anything close to what he says, and I think the players whom I have coached over the years will agree with me.”

“I have spent 63 years on this earth trying to do things the right way and the picture he portrays is not fair to the university or me.”

UNC has come under intense scrutiny following a published report made by ESPN’s Outside The Lines, in which Rashad claims to have taken bogus classes while attending the university. McCants told the program that he received significant assistance while on the UNC basketball team.

According to ESPN.com, McCants told Outside the Lines that “tutors wrote his term papers, he rarely went to class for about half his time at UNC, and he remained able to play largely because he took bogus classes designed to keep athletes academically eligible.”

He also made it known that he “could have been academically ineligible to play during the championship season had he not been provided the assistance.”

Rashad also dragged his head coach into the mess, claiming that coach Roy Williams knew about the “paper class” system at UNC in which students merely had to submit one term paper per year and never actually attend class to get a passing grade.

Coach Williams further elaborated on his denial of McCants claims in an interview with ESPN’s Jay Bilas on Saturday. In the 35-minute interview, Williams was joined by 11 former UNC players as a show of support for their former head coach. Roy even used their presence to help further expand on his side of the allegations.

He told Bilas the following:

“Every one of those players that are sitting over there and every player I’ve had make me feel like they did their work, and we emphasize that and we push them towards that all the time.”

This story first made headlines back in 2012, when the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer first reported that certain African-American Studies classes were fraudulent. Rashad McCants’ accounts give further credibility to those claims.

What do you think? Did Roy Williams have knowledge of academic fraud at UNC as Rashad McCants claims?