NCAA at Work
On the eve of the NCAA Basketball National Championship, here's a quick trivia question for you. Who was runner-up in the 2008 NCAA basketball national championship? Kansas won the title that year, who finished second?
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The answer is: no one.
Aren't vacating wins great? I find nothing more delightful than the NCAA's punishment system. Just imagine playing a game of Trivial Pursuit in 25 years and getting that question.
The way the NCAA works is by reviewing past discretions when they get around to it. Obviously they are a busy organization, but subsequently removing wins as punishment for players that graduated or left years prior seems a bit unorthodox. Right now the Kansas Jayhawks on are on the precipice of facing a John Calipari-coached team yet again for the National Championship. Of course Coach Cal has seemed pretty clean so far at Kentucky in regards to violations but he has also already lost Final Four appearances from his two previous coaching stops: aforementioned Memphis and UMass.
I suppose these decisions (the vacating of big wins or wins in general) punish the school itself and its legacy. But do fans or players even care? I am sure fans only care when rival students remind them of their school’s transgressions and it becomes an arguing point. Players, on the other hand, could not possibly be concerned with wins that happened years ago when they know they won those games, whether the victory remains written in the record books or not.
I'm not as much concerned with the feelings of players involved as I am with the fantastic paradoxes the NCAA strives to create with this form of punishment. Florida State and Alabama, in recent years, have been a part of wins vacating in football. In fact, FSU got caught with violations in 10 different sports. That means, without getting into specifics, if Alabama scored more points than their opponent a certain game, they could have had the win removed. But their opponent does not have the loss removed. Therefore, there will be teams that have lost games that no one won. Just delightful.
Obviously this is more clearly illustrated in simple win totals of teams or coaches, but shouldn't this be more clearly thought out? The Florida State football team under Bobby Bowden will now have 14 games where they scored more points than their opponent and did not win. But their stats will be skewed even deeper than that. Their average margin of victory will go sky high for those seasons. Just think about it. Let's say they won 10 games a certain season, by a total of 150 points, which comes out to an average victory of 15 points. Now what if they get six wins from that season taken away? Suddenly they only won four games that season, but still outscored their opponents by 150 points for the year. Their average margin in victories is now a whopping 37.5 points! I do not know which specific victories have been taken away, or if it is even decided, but I know that would be another fantastic piece of trivia. 'In 2006, Bowden's Seminoles won by an average of 37.5 points per game.' They must have been dominant.
Even more entertaining was the coaching record of Brian Ellerbe at the University of Michigan. Back in the late 90’s, because of the Ed Martin booster situation, the NCAA vacated a large chunk of wins and left Ellerbe with an official coaching record of 0-27 as successor to Steve Fisher. Keep in mind, Ellerbe’s opponents lost 37 times during the stretch but he never won any of them, officially.
Getting back to my original question, in the 2008 NCAA basketball title game, Kansas beat the Derrick Rose-led Memphis Tigers. This information does not change. Kansas did beat Memphis to win the title. However, Memphis did not technically lose the game because their Final Four and championship game appearances were vacated. So remember, don't add 2008 to the list of John Calipari and Memphis title game losses, even though they were in the title game and they did not win.
Vacating wins is just fantastically fun. Here’s hoping Coach Cal keeps his unprecedented streak alive and that we don’t find out about it until his tenure in Kentucky is long over, you know, just for old time’s sake.
