Back in 2016, the NCAA ordered the Notre Dame football team to vacate their 21 victories from the 2012-13 seasons due to academically ineligible players. The University attempted to appeal the decision, which the NCAA denied.
Notre Dame’s President, the Rev. John Jenkins, expressed some displeasure about the decision in a letter sent to alumni. Jenkins mentioned in the letter that the decision was unprecedented given who was involved in the misconduct and that the school was being punished for rigorously enforcing its honor code.
Putting aside the particulars of the misconduct, let’s focus on the penalty, which is the vacating of wins.
Seriously? Vacating victories from 5-6 years ago, that’s the fucking penalty? Who cares? Who the fuck cares?
Honestly what does vacating wins actually do? Especially when there’s no one left from those teams still playing. The only person who this penalty really affects is the head coach of the team. It does affect the coach’s official statistics as far as win total. In Notre Dame’s case, that would be Brian Kelly, who’s getting ready for his 9th season at Notre Dame.
With these 21 victories being vacated, Kelly will go from 122 victories (as a D-1A coach) down to 101.
Even with that, is something like this honestly going to have an effect on Kelly getting another job in the future? Not the scandal itself (which I highly doubt would have any sort of remote influence) but rather the fact that he now has 21 fewer victories.
No, of course, it won’t fucking affect that! Why?
Well, for one, 21 wins isn’t really that big of a difference, at least not when it comes to whether or not another school (this is just hypothetical) were to consider hiring Kelly.
Also, the NCAA could vacate every single game Notre Dame (or any school for that matter ) has ever won, but everyone would still remember Notre Dame actually winning the game on the field.
Back in 2012 (one of the seasons Notre Dame has to vacate wins from), the Fighting Irish went 12-0 in the regular season and found themselves in the BCS National Championship game (where they promptly ran into a brick wall known as the Alabama Crimson Tide).
Now with the program having to retroactively vacate their 12 wins from that season they theoretically drop to 0-13…or 0-1, whatever. Going 0-12 won’t exactly get you into the National Championship (even back in the BCS days). So now does the NCAA order Notre Dame to retroactively vacate their appearance in the game or some shit like that?
Even if they did somehow try to do that…I mean basically Notre Dame still played in the fucking game and they still won 12 games on the field to get there. The NCAA can’t go back in time and rewrite history, right?
One last point about how stupid this penalty is, Notre Dame’s loss in that aforementioned National Championship game does not get vacated. Even though they violated the same rules in that game that they did in their 12 previous, somehow this game gets to count… literally just because they lost.
Bottomline, this is just simply a stupid rule, enough said.