In American college athletics, a vacated victory is a win that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has stripped from an athletic team, usually as punishment for misconduct related to their sports programs. The team being punished is officially stripped of its victory, but the opposing team retains its loss—thus, vacated victories are different from forfeits, in which the losing team is given the win. The practice of vacating victories has been criticized by players and sports journalists, but remains one of the NCAA's preferred penalties for infractions related to past misconduct.[2] Over 160 college football teams and 270 college basketball teams[nb 1] have had wins vacated.[3]
A vacated victory is distinct from a forfeit, which simply reverses the outcome of a contest: when a game is forfeited, the team that won records a loss and the team that lost records a win.[4][5] By comparison, a vacated win only removes regular season and tournament wins from the record of the penalized team.[4] The opposing, non-penalized team retains all losses corresponding to vacated games in the regular season (although tournament losses are stricken).[5]
In the process of regulating infractions, the NCAA received complaints that their punishments did not penalize the actual perpetrators.[2] Prospective measures, like scholarship reductions or postseason bans, affected athletes who were unrelated to the original violation.[6] To remedy this, the NCAA's committee on infractions adopted the practice of vacating wins as a punishment that would be linked to the specific wrongdoers.[7] The NCAA has broad authority to apply this punishment, but is more likely to do in cases of major systemic fraud in a program or where academically ineligible players have competed.[6] When issuing punishments in the past, the NCAA Committee on Infractions ordered that regular season games be forfeited by the offending team while NCAA tournament games be vacated. More recently, forfeits have not been used at all, and both regular season and tournament games have been vacated.[8]
The precise first use of a vacated win as punishment is unclear. According to Sports Reference, the first recorded use of the punishment in college basketball took place after the 1961 NCAA gambling scandal.[9] The Saint Joseph's Hawks had four games in the NCAA tournament vacated, including their third-place finish.[10][11]
The first collegiate national title to be vacated was the 1971 men's soccer championship.[12][13] The Howard Bison were ruled to have fielded ineligible players, although analysts and historians have argued Howard was targeted because of the racial makeup of the team.[14][15] As of 2018, 20 college programs have had a national title vacated.[12]
The NCAA has vacated wins as a punishment for academic misconduct,[16] impermissible financial benefits,[17] and player sex scandals.[18][19] After making the punishment official, the NCAA requires schools to return trophies and take down any references (such as banners) to vacated achievements.[19] The NCAA has in some instances also vacated losses in tournaments or championship games, serving to vacate a team's appearance in the tournament or title contest.
By striking the win but not the corresponding loss, vacated victories result in anomalies such as games with losers but no winners, unbalanced series records,[nb 2] and inconsistent measures of head-to-head streaks.[nb 3]
The NCAA does not maintain official records between any two opposing teams, and initially it had no official policy for the treatment of vacated victories in calculating either series records or win/loss streaks between any two opposing teams. Various media outlets commented on the inconsistency between opponents' series records inherent to vacated victories. In June 2009, both the ESPN.com SEC Blog and the Chattanooga Times Free Press discussed NCAA sanctions against the Alabama Crimson Tide football program; each stated that games with vacated wins do not count at all in a series record between two teams.[20][21] Later, the NCAA's rules were updated to state that "all team and coaches’ streaks (such as wins, postseason appearances, team statistical streaks, and so on) are terminated by the vacancy of a contest."[5]
Athletes, administrators, and sports journalists have criticized the practice of vacating wins, arguing that it is arbitrary, confusing, and disproportionate to the infractions it punishes.[22][16][23] Those opposed to the punishment note that the NCAA is effectively asking fans and schools to pretend that the game never happened.[17][6] Former competitors and fans often reject the punishment, saying that the NCAA cannot take away the on-field accomplishments or memories of games.[19][24][2]
The practice of vacating victories has also been called insufficiently preventative, as schools are still able to keep money they received from their vacated accomplishments[25] and fans still consider the on-field result to be "real".[6]
In October 2020, the NCAA stripped the UMass women's tennis team of its 2017 Atlantic 10 Conference championship over the improper reimbursement of a $252 phone bill, leading to a public outcry.[26][27] One writer called the decision the "single worst miscarriage of justice" in the NCAA's history, as the original error was minor and the university had self-reported.[28] The players involved disputed the punishment, arguing that vacating their victories placed them in the same category as cheaters who gained a competitive advantage from misconduct.[28]