The news arrived late this summer that the NCAA was slamming down the gavel and forcing the Memphis State University basketball program to “vacate” 38 victories and its Final Four runner-up appearance of 2007-08. Really?
Everyone, friend or foe and, yes, you there on the couch, who watched even a minute of the Memphis Tigers’s record number of wins from the autumn through the national semi-finals is supposed to pretend they never saw them. Didn’t happen. UCLA fans, who have no problem remembering basketball victories, are presumed to be now celebrating their Bruins’s win in the April 2008 regional final, even though the scoreboard read: Memphis 78, UCLA 63. One wonders if Westwood sports fans really hoisted cold adult beverages when they heard the happy news their Bruins really had beaten Memphis.
This magical erasure of the sports mind has happened in college football too. We used to call these reversed decisions “forfeits.” They were handed down for all sorts of misdeeds, often the use, purposeful or accidental, of an ineligible player. The NCAA would slam down the gavel and shout at Arizona State (1979), Kansas (1960), or Mississippi State (1977): “You have to forfeit!” In today’s politically-correct world, the NCAA advises Memphis State that “You have to vacate your victories.”
Either way, it is the lamest punishment anywhere. This ain’t no Death Penalty, now is it SMU? Nobody is ever going to change their mind about what really occurred on the football field or basketball court.
Recently there was some talk that those arbitrary devils at the NCAA might punish Florida State for its academic misadventures in 2007. It was discovered several football players received answers prior to their final exam in a music appreciation course, just days before they were to compete, ironically, in the Music City Bowl. Perhaps the NCAA would force the Seminoles to vacate some or all of their seven football victories of that season. The first reaction was dismay that popular coach Bobby Bowden might have to turn back some wins that would almost certainly prevent him from finishing ahead of Penn State’s Joe Paterno in their on-going, nip-and-tuck race to the most all-time wins by a coach. By the NCAA’s count, Paterno currently leads 383 to 382.
We love Bobby Bowden. There could be no better ambassador for college football. He is gifted, smart, energetic, humble, religious, committed to his players and school, and downright witty. So, this is no personal indictment of him. But if Bowden were to be stripped of victories, don’t take “vacated” wins. The wins that should go are the truly-tainted victories he earned as head coach at his alma mater, Howard College (now known as Samford University) in 1959-62.
In those years, Howard played in the “College Division,” a level lower even than what we now call the FCS (or Division 1-AA). In other words, Howard played truly minor college football. When Henry Aaron approached Babe Ruth’s career home run record in baseball in 1974, did the baseball powers-that-be decide to include Aaron’s minor league homers against minor league pitchers in ’52 and ’53 at Eau Claire and Jacksonville? Of course not.
Bowden should vacate some victories, all right. Not Florida State’s wins over Colorado, Alabama, Boston College, and Maryland, et al, in 2007, but Howard’s 31in 1959-62 over the likes of Maryville, Sewanee, Livingston State, and Millsaps.
Bob Boyles
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