This article from insidehighered.com does a good job of describing the phoniness of UNC's argument about the scandal being beyond the jurisdiction of the NCAA.
'Beyond the NCAA's Purview'
insidehighered.com
North Carolina tells the sports governance group that it does not have the authority to punish the university for academic fraud. Association may be heading for another fight with one of its high-profile members.
August 10, 2016
By Jake New
"...The NCAA absolutely has jurisdiction over classes that were clearly created to obtain athletic eligibility,” said David Ridpath, professor of sports administration at Ohio University and an advocate for reforming the academic side of college sports. “The NCAA influences curricular decisions all the time at its member institutions, whether it's how to measure satisfactory progress towards a degree, or yes, punishing institutions for creating fake classes.”
Ridpath said he would prefer if the NCAA got out of academics altogether, adding that "maybe we can finally put to bed the idea that college athletics have any connection to education." But he noted that the association has punished conduct similar to UNC's before. In 2001, the NCAA sanctioned Marshall University for, among other violations, a professor granting A grades to all students in a course to help football players remain eligible. Like at UNC, nonathletes took the course as well. In that case, the association argued that the course was still an NCAA violation.
“And that was one course with maybe a couple dozen athletes,” said Ridpath, who reported the fraud as Marshall’s compliance director at the time. “At UNC, the fake courses were systemically helping men’s basketball and football players for nearly 20 years.
The NCAA needs to have the guts to say, ‘Are you kidding me? This was absolutely academic fraud.’ This isn't about assessing the quality of the courses, because there were no courses...”
