The NCAA forced Ole Miss to vacate 33 wins from 2010-2016 but it’s a totally hollow and meaningless punishment that achieves nothing.
The NCAA finally handed down its sanctions for Ole Miss, vacating 33 wins from the 2010-2016 seasons, and the school basically brushed off of its shoulder like it was dirt.
Who could blame them?
The NCAA, the organization that oversees collegiate athletics, more often uses the tool of “vacating wins” as a way for showing a violating school that it means business. The whole point of school being forced to vacate its wins during a successful era is to wipe it off of the face of the collegiate map, to make it seem as if that era never even happened.
That’s the point of vacating wins, but it never works out that way, which makes this supposed “strong-armed” tactic of the NCAA utterly meaningless.
A perfect example of how toothless vacating wins is lies within Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The “Fab Five” era at Michigan transformed college basketball, but when it was discovered that Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, and others took money from Detroit booster Ed Martin, part of the school’s punishment from the NCAA was to vacate most of those wins and the banners from their two Final Four appearances.
Guess what happened?
A documentary on the Fab Five, produced by ESPN, aired in 2011, and that team is stilled hailed as the group who changed college basketball. Their legacy is still remembered, fondly, which goes against the thought notion of vacated wins.
You can’t vacate anything if it still exists.
There are plenty of other moments where vacating wins didn’t work (SMU, USC, Memphis, etc.), and it begs the question:
If people are still going to praise those teams, what is the use of vacating wins?
The answer is as long as fans remember that era, it is useless for the NCAA to force a school to vacate wins from that era because they can’t take away the wins if the memory still lives on.