Roy Williams calls Maryland president 'double idiot' after death penalty comments
North Carolina head coach Roy Williams fired back at Maryland president Wallace Loh, calling him a "double idiot" after Loh suggested UNC should receive the death penalty as a result of a two-decade academic fraud scandal.
Loh made the comments last week during a Maryland senate meeting.
“As president I sit over a number of dormant volcanoes,” Loh said. “One of them is an athletic scandal. It blows up, it blows up the university, its reputation, it blows up the president. For the things that happened in North Carolina, it's abysmal. I would think that this would lead to the implementation of the death penalty by the NCAA. But I'm not in charge of that.
Williams was asked on SiriusXM College Sports Nation if winning the national championship this season had “special significance," especially when the academic fraud allegations have been investigated since 2010.
“There has been a lot of junk and people have questioned my integrity,” Williams said. “Even since we won, people have come out and said some things without information. They’ve just gone by what somebody else has said.
“We have a President that says we should get the death penalty. A president of another University. I mean, to me that’s just so silly. A guy told me one time, ‘You can get a little knowledge and it turns you into an idiot, but no knowledge you’re a double idiot.’ That’s about the way I look at that thing.”
The NCAA started looking into academic fraud concerning as many as 3,100 athletes in various sports over a two-decade period. Reports of athletes getting credit for not attending classes or doing minimum classwork to stay eligible were at the center of the investigation.
North Carolina received a third revised Notice of Allegations from the NCAA in December.
- Scooby Axson
