1990 NC State Basketball Controversy
Brian Nixon recalls the 1990 basketball controversy, visiting Coach Valvano in his home and speaking with members of the team.
Interview on 2011-07-28 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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I know that Coach Valvano was coming under a lot of fire at that time,
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saying that we didn't have-I wouldn't say grade changing but tutors were maybe doing more of the work than the students and all this kind of stuff.
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At the time he was wearing a dual hat of athletic director and coach and one of the things that continued to come out was were we doing things above board, were we doing things the right way.
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One of the things I did in my office is I actually wanted to investigate it myself. I wanted to find out the facts.
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I went to Coach Valvano's home, went and talked to him, talked to my buddy on the team, talked to several of the guys on the team, and I didn't find any of that.
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I found that we may have had some struggles academically [Laughs] but many college programs do.
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I think we did need to improve our graduation rates. If you read what happened, Coach V did start instituting stricter curfews,
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better dress codes, a kind of a curb on how many complimentary tickets the kids would get, athletic gear only assigned to the athletic department,
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improve the tutoring situation, so after looking at that I really felt that he was trying to do the right thing.
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There were some opportunities for conflict of interest, I thought, in his AD role,
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because sometimes there was Jim Valvano the basketball coach and there was Jim Valvano our athletic director but there was also Jim Valvano just a sports personality.
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