Notes from a Louisville fan and alum: What UNC should learn about shame.

Last week, the NCAA cleared UNC of any potential violations surrounding what many have called the most egregious case of academic fraud in the history of college athletics. When the news broke, the most irate fanbase wasn't that of instate rivals Duke or NC State, but the beleaguered fans at the University of Louisville, and rightfully so.

I'm a Louisville guy through and through. I grew up going to men's basketball games, mostly during the lean years of the 1990s, when Rick Pitino was hanging banners in Rupp Arena for the University of Kentucky. I attended U of L in the mid-2000s, and with Pitino now coaching Louisville, the program reached its first Final Four in almost two decades. I was a grad student in Georgia when Louisville finally won the title in Atlanta's Georgia Dome, ending nearly three decades of disappointment. It was the happiest moment of my sporting life.

Then came the scandals. Assistant Coach Andre McGee had hired strippers/prostitutes to "entertain" current players and recruits in the athletic dorms. It was tawdry, embarrassing, and immoral, and as an alumnus and lifelong fan of the program, I felt a sense of personal shame.

Still, I tried to defend it to some degree. It's a natural response. And was happy to see that the university admitted to wrong-doing and took steps to punish itself -- including a postseason ban -- not just because I hoped it would reduce the inevitable NCAA punishment, but because it was the right thing to do.

The NCAA apparently disagreed, and over the summer hit Louisville with severe punishments that stunned not only the university, but much of the sports world as well. Louisville is set to be the first basketball program in NCAA history to be stripped of its championship banner.

And it only got worse. In the fall, Louisville was implicated in a larger FBI investigation, and the evidence clearly shows that, under the direction of Louisville coaches, Adidas paid players to attend the university. This is a clear violation of NCAA rules, and the university acted quickly to dismiss Pitino and prepared to fire Athletic Director Tom Jurich. Again, Louisville acted preemptively to appease the NCAA.

As a fan, I'm often asked about my feelings on the issue. My response has essentially been that we're guilty and should be punished accordingly. Ideally, NCAA rules regarding the recruitment and treatment of current and prospective players are meant to ensure an equal playing field among universities, and to protect student from exploitation (at least more than what the NCAA currently sanctions). We broke those rules. We have it coming.

After the UNC rulings, my attitudes have changed. If the NCAA comes for Louisville's 2013 banner, they can pry it from my cold, dead hands. Alternatively, I'm willing to trade it for three of UNC's (2005, 2009, 2017).

As a Louisville fan and alum, my outrage over the UNC case comes from a perception that the NCAA distributes justice unequally and applies its rules arbitrarily. Given the nature of the two schools' violations, that's a reasoned response.

An unreasoned response is that of UNC students, fans, and alums. From what I can tell, the mood is one of relief and joy. On the one hand, I understand they feel good to have dodged a bullet. But they don't seem to realize they dodged that bullet by jumping in front of a cannonball.

Where is the sense of shame for the manner in which they skated charges? UNC admitted to offering fake courses to student for nearly two decades, but because these courses were available to all students and not just athletes, they weren't guilty of violating NCAA rules on the special treatment for athletes. While that may be technically true, consider what the defense really means: UNC is innocent of NCAA violations because they committed widespread academic fraud rather than narrower, case-by-case fraud.

Astounding.

Were I a student or alum of UNC, I would be furious. The university was willing to trade on its academic reputation to preserve its athletic prowess.

And look. I get it. College sports matter. They're exciting. They're a rallying point for those associated with the school, and a lightning rod for fostering school spirit and attracting donations.

But universities don't exist to provide sports entertainment. They exists to advance knowledge through research and education, much nobler though less discussed goals. To sacrifice that is nothing less than shameful, especially for UNC, which U.S. News ranks the fifth best public university in the country.

For all the embarrassment Louisville's indiscretions have brought to its alums, they never cheapened the value of our degrees or our education. I went to the 87th best public university, and even I can see that. Maybe its time we re-evaluate those rankings, or even UNC's accreditation status, because a school so willing to brazenly defraud its students should be punished, even if its basketball team seemingly can't be or never will.

Learned helplessness and a lone shooter

Learned helplessness pervades much of the current American political landscape, but we often fail to see it or mistake it for something else. Nowhere is this effect and the confusion surrounding it more visible than in discussion of gun control.

We're a week out from a Las Vegas shooting that killed nearly 60 people and wounded over 500 more. My initial response wasn't shock. It was a sort of muted horror stemming from the knowledge that gun violence on a mass scale appears to be a loose thread in the American fabric we can't seem to cut free.

It's become such a regular occurrence that the national response is routine:

• The president and media express outrage and send "thoughts and prayers."
• Many prominent figures claim now is the time for debate and action on gun violence.
• Defenders of gun rights express "now is not the time" to discuss such issues.
• Congress asks for a moment of silence and we fly flags at half mast.
• We fight familiar fights on our Facebook feeds, retreating to ideological corners.
• Legislation (often weak or meaningless) is put before Congress, and it doesn't pass.

Over time, we become desensitized to these events because of the regularity and the routine, and many writers have been saying as much for years.

But I think it runs deeper. I think we've barreled into learned helplessness territory. To be desensitized to certain events simply means that we no longer react with strong emotionality because we've seen it before. Rampant gun violence certainly creates desensitization, and that can inhibit our willingness to act, but not to the degree of learned helplessness.

Learned helplessness comes about in much the same way as desensitization, but its much more insidious. For example, let's say you have a rat in a cage. You then administer a small electrical shock to a portion of the cage floor. Naturally, the rat will move to escape the shock. 

But what happens if you electrify the entire cage floor? At first, the same thing. The rat will attempt to escape the shock. Over time, however, he will eventually learn that there is no escape, and he'll stop trying.

Does the shock still hurt? Yes. He hasn't been desensitized fully. But he's learned that he is helpless in his situation and thus no longer fights it.

I think that's how most Americans are starting feel about gun violence, and the data backs this up. According to Pew Research, the majority of Americans -- often a significant majority -- support a variety of gun safety measures:

• 50% want to ban high-ammunition clips
• 52% want to ban assault-style weapons
• 68% favor creating a federal database to track gun sales
• 71% favor banning individuals on the no-fly list from buying guns
• 76% back limits on gun ownership among the mentally ill
• 81% back universal background checks

And before any Second Amendment purists absolutely lose their shit, yes, there are issues with each of these solutions. For example, how do we define mental illness? And what about people erroneously placed on the no-fly list? Then there's the fact that, in many instances, enacting all of these measures won't eliminate the problem. 

I admit these weakness, but I would argue those are piss poor excuses for not at least trying to mitigate this problem. Surely there can be some reasonable middle ground here.

But my larger point here is that the majority of Americans want to see some action taken on this issue, but for a variety of reasons, Congress refuses to do anything of substance. And this refusal is incredibly dangerous for our democracy. If you're in the majority here, it's hard to look at this situation and not feel helpless. I mean, damn. We're a democracy. Shouldn't majority opinion have more sway? 

And that feeling of helplessness, perhaps more than any other single factor, leads us to check out more and more from the political debates that substantially affect our lives.

It also leads us to make rash political decisions in a desperate attempt to retake some control. It's hard to look at the election of Donald Trump without seeing learned helplessness at play. The narrative of forgotten Americans wandering the political wilderness searching for a voice -- any voice -- is how you end up with seemingly reasonable individuals even entertaining a candidate so thoroughly and obviously unqualified and unfit.

There are a number of issues about which Americans are in relative agreement: limiting gun violence, modernizing infrastructure, providing universal (or at least expanded) access to affordable health care, and not starting a nuclear war, to name a few. But the longer elected officials delay in tackling these issues, the more helpless the electorate feels; the more disconnected the citizenry sees itself from its representatives; the more unstable our democracy becomes; and the more dangerous and unpredictable our political, social, and economic futures appear to be.