NEWS RELEASE - Fifth-year senior forward Will Graves has been dismissed from the University of North Carolina men's basketball team for failure to comply with team rules, head coach Roy Williams announced today.
Graves red-shirted in 2006-07 then played in 92 games over the past three seasons. He scored 513 points at UNC, including 353 last year, when he averaged 9.8 points per game and was the Tar Heels' third-leading scorer.
The Greensboro, N.C., native made seven three-pointers and scored a career-high 25 points in the 2010 NIT championship game against Dayton.
"This is 100 percent not related to any NCAA matters on campus," says head coach Roy Williams. "I hate this for Will. He worked extremely hard this summer to get himself physically in the best shape he's been in years, but he did not do everything he needed to do to be a part of our basketball program. This is a huge blow to our team, but an even bigger blow for Will. Playing for the Tar Heels meant so much to him."
Thursday, October 7, 2010
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Probably no one outside the program knows exactly what's going on - if Coach Williams is anything like Coach Smith was in that regard.
ReplyDeleteBut two years ago when Graves was suspended, there were rumors circulating, not only on the Internet but amongst Rams Club members about why he was suspended.
Could the same issue have prompted his dismissal from the team this time?
As the news came over the wire at 4:20 this afternoon, I was just sitting around having some O.J. and a burrito, listening to the Doobie Brothers and fretting that I needed to mow the grass. It hit me like an A-bomb. Bammy! Boom! Graves is off the team. Just like that, we have controversy on the UNC basketball team now. Graves could have been a senior leader and could have been the ace from behind the arc. We can all speculate about what happened but the bottom line is that Graves is no longer on the team. It must have been something really important to Coach Williams that he would want to go there in light of the recent NCAA investigation about scouts and the school investigation about academic fraud.