Vacated victory
sport result later voided
In American college athletics, a vacated victory is a win that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has stripped from an athletic program, usually as punishment for misconduct related to its sports teams. 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. Over 160 college football teams and 270 college basketball teams have had wins vacated.
Definition
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. By comparison, a vacated win only removes regular season and tournament wins from the record of the penalized team. The opposing, non-penalized team retains all losses corresponding to vacated games in the regular season (although tournament losses are stricken).
History
In the process of regulating infractions, the NCAA received complaints that their punishments did not penalize the actual perpetrators. Prospective measures, like scholarship reductions or postseason bans, affected athletes who were unrelated to the original violation. 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.
“Vacated victory” enters the record as sport result later voided. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Vacated, victory and sport can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vacated victory” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.