Home of the legendary Tar Heels basketball team, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill enjoys a sporting brand known the world over. The alma mater of Michael Jordan and Mia Hamm, winner of forty national championships in six different sports, and a partner in what Sporting News calls "the best rivalry in sports," UNC-Chapel Hill is a colossus of college athletics. Now, it has become ground zero in the debate on how the $16 billion college sports industry operates--an industry that coexists uneasily within a university system professly dedicated to education and research. Written by notorious UNC athletics department whistleblower, Mary Willingham, and her close faculty ally, Jay Smith, Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports exposes the fraudulent inner workings that for decades have allowed barely literate basketball and football players to take fake courses, earning fake degrees from one of the nation's top universities while faculty and administrators looked the other way. In unobscured detail, Cheated recounts the academic fraud in UNC's athletic department, even as university leaders attempted to sweep the matter under the rug in order to keep the billion-dollar college sports revenue machine functioning, and it makes an impassioned argument that the"student-athletes" in these programs are being cheated of what, after all, has been promised them from the start--a college education.

In 2010 allegations of an utterly corrupt academic system for student-athletes emerged from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus, home of the legendary Tar Heels. As the alma mater of Michael Jordan, Marion Jones, Lawrence Taylor, Rashad McCants, and many others, the winner of forty national championships in six different sports, and a partner in one of the best rivalries in sports, UNC-Chapel Hill is a world famous colossus of college athletics. Yet for almost twenty years, from 1993 to 2011, UNC prioritized sports over academics by allowing athletes to enroll in and earn high grades for nonexistent classes, letting athletics at the school undermine and corrupt its mission of truth, discovery, and free inquiry. Written by UNC professor of history Jay Smith and UNC athletics department whistleblower Mary Willingham, Cheated exposes the fraudulent inner workings of this famous university. For decades these internal systems have allowed woefully underprepared basketball and football players to take fake courses and earn devalued degrees from one of the nation's top universities while faculty and administrators looked the other way. In unbiased and carefully sourced detail, Cheated recounts the academic fraud in UNC's athletics department, even as university leaders focused on minimizing the damage in order to keep the billion-dollar college sports revenue machine functioning. Smith and Willingham make an impassioned argument that the "student-athletes" in these programs are being cheated out of what, after all, is promised them in the first place: a college education. Updated with a new epilogue, Cheated carries the narrative through the dramatic and defining events of 2017 including the landmark Wainstein report, the findings of which UNC leaders initially embraced, only to push it aside in an audacious strategy of denial with the NCAA. UNC resisted owning up to its failure and called the NCAA's bluff, ultimately escaping punishment for offering sham coursework. Finally, the epilogue also covers the lengths UNC administrators went to in order to prevent critical discussion of the scandal in UNC classrooms. The ongoing fallout from this scandal-and the continuing spotlight on the failings of college athletics, which are hardly unique to UNC-has continued to inform the debate about how the $16 billion college sports industry operates and has influence on college campuses nationwide.