Wolken: North Carolina's Larry Fedora makes two big mistakes at one time in Tim Beckman hire

North Carolina coach Larry Fedora embarrassed himself Wednesday.

Unnecessary, egregious embarrassment for himself, not to mention a university and an athletic department that doesn’t need any more of it. 

No matter how much time North Carolina spent Wednesday minimizing former Illinois coach Tim Beckman’s new role on its football staff — he’s a volunteer coach, he won’t be working with players, he’s only going to be analyzing film, blah, blah, blah — the fact remains that Fedora has chosen to associate with somebody who was fired last year for mistreating players after Illinois hired the Franczek Radelet law firm out of Chicago to investigate. 

And even worse, Fedora attempted to justify it by using straw men and half-truths to absolve Beckman, a buddy he worked with at Oklahoma State a decade ago, from any wrongdoing at Illinois.

“I don’t believe everything I read, all right,” Fedora said, according to the Raleigh News & Observer. “I know Tim. I know his side of the story, also. So I was comfortable with it. If I wouldn’t have been, obviously I wouldn’t have brought him. I wouldn’t have allowed him to be in our program."

Embattled ex-Illinois coach working at UNC as volunteer assistant

He continued: “I know (criticism is) going to happen, and then a couple of days from now it won’t be news. I mean, I promise you, I didn’t see anywhere where the NCAA said that he should be banished from the game of football. You know?

“I mean, the guy didn’t win enough games. That’s all it was.”

Uh, no, Larry. That wasn’t “all it was.” 

He was fired because, after a series of players went public with troubling stories, a law firm hired by Illinois found evidence to support the following conclusions, as outlined in its report made public Nov. 6, 2015:

• Coach Beckman attempted to instill a belief system in players to play through injuries and return too quickly from injuries to benefit the team by pressuring or influencing players not to report injuries or play through them;
• Coach Beckman criticized players who sought medical treatment or were not playing because of injury with demeaning comments and other communication tactics;
• coaches placed their medical judgment above that of physicians and led players to be misinformed regarding medical options and expected recovery time from injury;
• coaches pressured athletic trainers to aggressively interpret physician diagnoses and player restrictions to return injured players to practice prematurely; and 
• coaches influenced medical decisions in ways that prioritized the team over the individual player’s welfare.

MORE: Full report from Illinois (PDF)

So no, Beckman’s 12-25 record at Illinois wasn’t the only reason he was fired. If it were, would he really have settled for a mere $250,000 rather than go after the entire $3.1 million remaining on his contract? 

And Fedora’s contention that Beckman hasn’t been banished from the NCAA? That’s simply spin. For one thing, Beckman’s misdeeds at Illinois were never an NCAA issue to begin with but rather a breach of university standards and common decency. And even if something did rise to the level an NCAA violation, the NCAA doesn’t and can’t “banish” coaches but rather sanction their activities. 

In Beckman’s case, it shouldn’t need to.

With all the attention given to safety and making sure football players’ bodies are being properly cared for, you’d think a school would be smart enough not to justify or endorse the kind of culture Beckman had built at Illinois.

But obviously, Fedora doesn't know or simply doesn’t care. Either way, it’s a bad look for him and even worse for North Carolina, which is unnecessarily letting it happen.

2016 HEISMAN CANDIDATES: