In the past couple of weeks, the NCAA has found itself dealing with penalties that resulted in teams vacating both wins and championships. First, there was the denial of an appeal made by the University of Notre Dame which will result in vacating 21 football wins from 2012-13. Second, the University of Louisville has been ordered to vacate 123 wins from 2012-15, including a national championship in 2013.

While both schools did wrong to receive these penalties, the vacating penalty does not seem to make sense when everything comes together.

An individual has to think about what vacating wins and championships really does. Sure, a team like Louisville, in this case, will no longer officially be recognized as the 2013 national champions. Notre Dame head football coach Brian Kelly, for the remainder of the off season, will now be recognized as having 101 career wins as opposed to 122. The NCAA can order programs to vacate all the wins and championships, but that will never change the fact that those teams won those games on the field or court. If anything, this penalty seems more or less like the closest the NCAA can possibly come to going back in time and changing outcomes as a punishment. Needless to say, it is pretty ineffective.

A thought that comes into question when thinking of possible alternatives is: how much responsibility should the program itself take? Of course, this can very subjective depending on the situation the program is being punished for. Often times, the NCAA will limit how many scholarships a program can give out after being penalized. That seems to be a more reasonable punishment than vacating wins. By limiting scholarships, a program will have a harder time landing as many quality prospects and will likely have a negative effect on the team’s performance.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the vacating wins penalty is simply the fact that only a team’s wins are vacated.

In Notre Dame’s situation, their five losses over the course of the 2012 and 2013 seasons still count. Even though they still violated the same rules as they did in the wins they now have to vacate, the results of these games still count literally just because they lost. That theory does not seem to make much sense.

Overall, the punishment of making programs vacate wins should just be done away with, if anything, it makes the NCAA look like more a joke.

Photo provided by Pixabay