Good point, ND might not have sent any evidence to the NCAA but I'm assuming they believed they had somewhat good evidence of cheating before notifying them.
I'm certain they didn't. The NCAA rules put a serious premium on self-reporting. As soon as a violation is suspected, schools are supposed to hold the suspects out of competition and
start an investigation. As long as you report it early and perform a real investigation, sanctions are extremely unlikely to be imposed. SOP for dealing with the NCAA.
Unfortunately, it looks like someone within the NCAA leaked the story soon after ND self-reported, which is what necessitated that embarrassing press conference. I wouldn't read too much into what was essentially forced damage control on ND's part.
And according to the first post, that evidence is DD's emails of "i need help on a paper"
It doesnt make sense.
You keep hammering on that one line. If that alone sparked this entire witch hunt, then yes, that would be absurd. But I very much doubt that was the case. DD allegedly emailed a paper to a professor which included a conversation with someone who helped him edit the paper. The prof read the convo and thought it indicated academic fraud. That prof then forwarded his evidence onto the administration, who began an investigation. As LAX mentioned on a previous page, that investigation likely uncovered a lot of other stuff.
You're right that none of this would make sense if it was all one big misunderstanding about a single innocuous phrase in a DD email. But that's not a very reasonable assumption to make.
just kidding obviously. 
