Michael McAdoo filed suit against the NCAA and University of North Carolina in an effort to have his eligibility restored after it was stripped in the wake of allegations of academic misconduct and improper benefits. McAdoo allegedly passed off others' work as his own after a tutor helped rework a paper he'd wrote for a class. But the suit took a turn for the weird on Friday as the allegations against McAdoo, including full-scale plagiarism, deepened.
A Sports By Brooks post on Friday morning alleges McAdoo engaged in gross academic misconduct, going so far as to copy nearly an entire term paper from a variety of different sources. McAdoo then asked an academic tutor to check the paper over and make sure his citations were in order because he was worried about plagiarism.
Now for the bizarre part: McAdoo’s paper cited the sources from which huge swaths of exact text were lifted.
In other words, McAdoo, tutor Wiley (and apparently Baddour, Keadey, other UNC officials and the UNC honor court) thought it was okay to plagiarize long passages from other academic works so long as they footnoted the source!
He goes on to cite large portions of the paper copied word-for-word from existing sources found on the Internet.
The paper itself was the subject of an NCAA investigation that resulted in McAdoo having his eligibility stripped. North Carolina officials, including the athletic director, went to bat for McAdoo twice, pleading with the NCAA to allow the football player to retain his eligibility while arguing the tutor in question was simply acting as a safety net for McAdoo, looking over his work and proofreading it.
It would seem the allegations throw a giant wrench into McAdoo's case against UNC and the NCAA. If he did, indeed, engage in such an instance of blatant plagiarism, it would seem to lend credence his eligibility being stripped for academic conduct. But with the case yet to play out in court, it's still unknown how the latest news could affect the lawsuit.
For more on the NCAA investigation into North Carolina, check out the rest of this StoryStream and visit Carolina March.
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