What happens when the NCAA vacates wins? And why do they do it?

In official record keeping, kiss the victories goodbye.

So your school has traversed the lengthy and arduous process that is an NCAA violation and both the ruling and the likely appeal have been lost. In the suite of penalties handed down, one of them is the vacation of a certain amount of wins from the period during which an ineligible player or coach participated.

As fans, we watched the game and we remember what happened. Nobody can strip away the memories that everyone involved enjoyed. But the NCAA can strip the records from the equation, and that’s what vacating wins is really about.

What happens to the titles and banners that a team may have won?

Those are gone.

While the NCAA’s only done it once apiece in men’s basketball and football, if an athlete played ineligible in a national title campaign, then the penalty will strip that title away since it was technically a win. It’s happened to USC’s 2004 football title and Louisville’s 2013 men’s basketball title.

The famous Fab Five Michigan Wolverine basketball team had its two Final Four banners taken down from 1992 and 1993 in perhaps the most notable case of the NCAA vacating wins from a non-championship winning team. Louisville will also have to vacate its 2012 Final Four appearance.

Do losses get vacated too?

Nope, it’s just the wins. Back in 2016, Notre Dame was hit with sanctions from the NCAA, including vacating some wins from an academic fraud case. While the vacation of wins was one of many things the NCAA chose to use to remedy the situation, it’s the only thing Notre Dame actually appealed in the case while still expressing concerns over broader academic autonomy within the organization.

The reason why has to do with history. When wins are vacated, the school cannot officially acknowledge that the wins took place without an asterisk. But the losses remain. So Notre Dame’s 2012 season officially ends with an 0-1 record. There’s a specific reason why that’s a problem for Notre Dame.

Notre Dame and Michigan open the 2018 season in South Bend. Notre Dame’s all-time winning percentage previously was .7288, and Michigan’s was .7291.

But since there are no ties in college football anymore, a win by the Irish on Sept. 1 would have bumped their percentage up to .7296 and Michigan’s down to .7286. Not anymore. By nixing 21 wins between the 2012 and 2013 seasons, the decision drops ND to 885 wins all-time, and a .7123 all-time win percentage. That’s also behind Ohio State, Boise State, Oklahoma and Alabama, for sixth all-time among FBS programs.

Do other teams get added wins?

No, but they do keep the losses. While it’s funny for every team that lost to, for instance, that 2013 Louisville national title team to say that the game didn’t happen, it did. The NCAA upholds the loss on the losers’ record, but not the win on the winners’ record when a game is vacated.

Who is actually doing the vacating here?

To get extremely technical about the whole situation, the group that levies the penalty is actually the NCAA’s committee on infractions. It’s a group of up to 24 people who hear NCAA rules violation cases. The committee can include conference reps, university faculty, members of the general public with legal training and current or former administrators and coaches. They serve defined terms, and can re-up when those terms are done.

When it comes to the penalty phase of the investigation. There are a few ways the COI puts down penalties on NCAA member schools. Vacating wins is one big way to “get” a school for things that happened in the past after a player or a coach has left the program.

NCAA sanctions must be legitimately punitive to be effective. The intent of penalties is to ensure they are sufficient to deter schools from breaking the rules again and that they remove any competitive advantage that may have been gained. For this reason, penalties can be retrospective (such as a vacation of records) or prospective (such as scholarship losses or recruiting restrictions). Usually, based on the specifics of the case, it is a combination of both.

After a 2013 decision simplified the connection between penalty and enforcement, the COI essentially has a menu that makes things more straightforward in regard to discerning what violation lines up with what penalty.

How often does it happen?

A 2016 study funded by the NCAA conducted by Temple University looked at 61 years of NCAA cases and found that in over 500 cases, the NCAA takes away wins least often.

Temple University

Part of that has to do with a former member of the NCAA’s admission that vacating wins isn’t the most effective way to deter violations.

The membership has on multiple occasions acknowledged that postseason bans, scholarship reductions, and coach suspensions offer the most effective deterrent to potential rule breakers — and they are also the most effective in addressing the advantages gained as a result.

Why do schools make it a big deal when it happens?

The vacation of victories can have some real side effects in record keeping, if only for appearances.

This came into play with Florida State and Virginia Tech last fall. Former coach Bobby Bowden and the Noles had 12 victories stripped due to an academic cheating scandal back in the mid-2000s. That included an Emerald Bowl victory in 2005. Florida State has played in 36 straight bowl games after its Independence Bowl win over Southern Miss, but the NCAA’s record book doesn’t acknowledge the record.

The Noles acknowledge the Emerald Bowl appearance while noting the ruling.

And FSU calls a spade a spade when it comes to bowl appearances with some careful wording.

Common sense leads you to believe that of course the Noles bowl streak continues, but technically Virginia Tech can — and does — claim the inverse to assert that its active streak of bowl games leads the nation.