UNC Tar Heels Football Suspensions Update: What Does It Mean If Heels Don't Win?

The NCAA disclosed a ruling on two North Carolina football players Wednesday, taking the next step in an investigation that has been ongoing since July.

The NCAA ruled that cornerback Kendric Burney and safety Deunta Williams, both seniors, have to miss more games and pay back benefits to charity. 

The NCAA student-athlete reinstatement staff decided that Burney had received $1,333 in agent benefits stemming from trips to California, Atlanta, and Las Vegas.

In order to regain his eligibility, Burney must sit out an additional four games—making it six total—and pay $575.19 to a charity of his choice.

Williams will miss two more games—four total—and pay $450.67 to a charity of his choice after receiving, according to the NCAA, $1,426 in benefits after making two reported trips to California.

For now, that’s all we know.

UNC athletic director Dick Baddour said the school will appeal the suspensions, but the NCAA has zero reason for overturning its initial ruling. 

“While I respect the NCAA process, I believe the penalties to be unduly harsh given the individual circumstances in these cases,” Baddour said.

Four to six games isn’t too harsh for a player who broke NCAA rules and received free benefits from an agent if that’s the type of message the association wants to send.

Shoot, Georgia wide receiver A.J. Green received a four-game ban for selling his own jersey to a man who proclaims he isn’t an agent. The NCAA claimed otherwise, and forced Green to sit.

While any progress is joyfully accepted in Chapel Hill, the decisions on Burney and Williams don’t even come close to wrapping up this investigation.

Defensive starters Marvin Austin, Robert Quinn, Charles Brown, and Da’Norris Searcy all remain sidelined.

Wide receiver Greg Little and running back Ryan Houston also remain under investigation and will not play for the time being.

The problem is that unless North Carolina turns its season around quickly—and quickly would include winning the must-win game at Rutgers this week—all of this news will be irrelevant.

Nobody knows the fate of the remaining players under investigation, but they presumably will not be eligible to play before Williams does in Week 5.

And by then, Carolina’s season may be all but over, Butch Davis’ job all but gone.

The 0-2 Tar Heels go to Rutgers this weekend, and they had better come out on Saturday like their season depends on it, because it does.

If Carolina falls to 0-3, it returns home to face a dangerous East Carolina team that Butch Davis has beaten only once since coming to Chapel Hill.

There are few games on North Carolina’s schedule as important to the instate football fans than Carolina-ECU, and the Pirates will come to Chapel Hill ready to roll. You can count on that. 

The only silver lining is that Carolina will have played only one ACC game—a loss to Georgia Tech—when Williams returns to a defense that is begging for stability.

The Tar Heels will still have seven ACC games left to play, plenty to remain competitive in the conference and compete for a conference crown.

Carolina would probably have to go 6-1 in ACC games the rest of the way—making the Heels 6-2 in ACC play for the year—in order to have a shot at playing in the Orange Bowl.

For a season that started out with dark-horse national title talk, winning the ACC is the only way Carolina will get to a BCS bowl this season.

Getting Williams back will help the defense regain some confidence and leadership, two things it greatly lacked last weekend against the Yellow Jackets.

Georgia Tech’s triple option exposed Carolina’s inexperience as the Tar Heels repeatedly blew assignments and allowed quarterback Josh Nesbitt to execute his offense at will.

The fact that Carolina’s defense is its weak link is shocking, but that’s exactly what these investigations have done to the program.

Quarterback T.J. Yates has done his part in the first two games, showing improvement and a sense of urgency and command that he missed last year.

Yates’ gross numbers will not jump off the page.

We’re not getting him mixed up with Denard Robinson here, OK.

But the reason why Yates has kept Carolina in both of its games is because he has shown the ability to make much better decisions with the football. If the throw he wants isn’t there, he’s not forcing it.

He’ll check it down and gain three yards, he’ll tuck it and run, or at worst he will throw it away.

But there’s going to come a time, and that time is probably this weekend, when Yates will have to gamble on some throws in an attempt to put this team on his back by putting points on the board.

He knows what the defense is right now, and it’s not the version he played with last year.

But somehow, someway, Carolina will have to win while waiting for the NCAA to wrap up its investigation.

If not, the investigation, much like a once-promising season, won’t mean a thing.

And—for the seniors that abided by the rules—that would be a shame.

Follow Teddy Mitrosilis on Twitter. You can reach him at [e-mail].