If this isn’t making sense to you, welcome to college athletics. I hope you brought some Advil.
The NCAA’s practice of punishing infractions by win-vacancy is fundamentally incoherent; it’s genuinely hard to describe what the punishment means without sounding idiotic. One could argue that it’s simply the NCAA’s way of declaring that an institution cheated, but you don’t need vacancy to do that. You just need a PDF report that says, “They cheated.” Vacancy isn’t merely declaratory, but distortive. It’s taking an event that happened and ordering everyone to pretend that it didn’t.
In this regard the NCAA might want to give some thought to the company it’s keeping. Authoritarian manipulation of history is a pretty reliable indicator that (i) someone in power is embarrassed by sketchy shit that went down, and (ii) he or she isn’t up to the challenge of defending that sketchy shit in open, public discourse, so (iii) why not fall back on the exercise of power by fiat, effectively ruling that people should shut up about it and move on? Think Joseph Stalin having textbooks doctored to remove photographs of purged political rivals, or the Turkish government’s denial of post-World War I Armenian genocide.
Nearly awarding a national championship to a team that used an ineligible player doesn’t rank the NCAA among history’s greatest monsters, but you can see why they’d be a skosh embarrassed by it. The discomfort here is no doubt compounded by rules – set forth in the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement but from which the NCAA benefits – indefensibly coercing the Derrick Roses of the world to provide a year’s worth of free labor to the college basketball industry in lieu of getting paid by a professional team, and thus creating incentives for student-athletes a bit marginal on the "student" part of that label to cheat. Vacating wins allows the NCAA to scrub the official record and strike a rectitudinous pose without acknowledging any complicity in the underlying crime.
Gravity’s Rainbow Jumper
More abstractly, it rattles the fault line that exists between Enlightenment philosophies of history and their postmodernist critics. Enlightenment values, which were ascendant in the profession of history toward the beginning of the 20th century, maintain that history has an objectively discernible nature – that through scientific observation we can accumulate a sound body of knowledge about past events. History, the argument goes, transcends theory and ideology; the past is observable and fixed.
Article comments
1 - Matthew T. Sussman
I knew something was amiss when Derrick Rose was asked how he did on analogies and said he didn't see any questions on old televisions.
My HS vacated a state championship because of an ineligible rarely used freshman. The guilt was so bad, he transferred away the next year.
Now, Rose was no bench bum, but what difference does it make to him? What punishment does Rose serve? It wasn't entirely his fault, but he was an adult and he enabled it.
2 - James Cauthen
You have to step back and take a look at the bigger picture. It wasn't UCLA that was robbed, it was Texas. Texas, who lost to Memphis in the regional final, had already beaten both UCLA and Kansas that year. So, obviously, had Memphis not cheated Texas would be the National Champions.
Also, Rose was caught cheating way before the NCAA tournament, only Calipari and Memphis decided not to do anything about it. In October of 2007, Memphis was notified of allegations that he cheated on his SAT by the Chicago school system. It is unclear from the NCAA's report whether the NCAA was also notified. Regardless, Calipari disregarded the allegations (they interviewed Rose) and played Rose knowing that the validity of his SAT was in question. It looks like that worked out okay for him.
3 - The Desert Rat
Great article - how long will it take for this nation to wake up to the fact that the NCAA is a)a monopoly that b)serves only to better itself - salaries, etc, and c) uses a system that is just a little better than slave labor.
These "kids" in big time NCAA sports are simply "labor" that aren't being paid a "living wage". In the "major sports" - football, basketball especially - they are being taken advantage of by their schools, their coaches, and the media. And when they get hurt or their playing days are over they are quickly tossed under the bus.
Someone - think it was NE - once proposed created a degree in football. Arguing that like music or engineering where a student is encouraged to practice his chosen field of endeavor at every opportunity - an "athlete" is in fact prohibited from doing so except at the school (and NCAA of course) which would benefit from his/her efforts. And in fact is prohibited from earning almost any kind of wage - thus keeping them as "indentured servants" to the NCAA.
4 - Dexter Fishmore
@Matthew - Yes, the whole affair appears to be a matter of indifference to Rose, who's responded only with a feeble statement along the lines of "I didn't do anything wrong." He's fat-stacking benjamins in the NBA and is beyond the NCAA's jurisdiction, so I doubt any of this is keeping him up at night.
@James - I assume when you say "Texas" you mean Texas-Arlington, the 16th seed that lost to Memphis in the first round. Were it not for Rose's chicanery, they could have become the first 16 seed to win a game in tournament!
@Desert Rat - Good points all. As someone (not I) once put it, big-time college sports are essentially salary-capped pro leagues, with the salary cap set at zero.
5 - El Bicho
Great article. Humorous and insightful, though you failed to cover the biggest impact this chicanery had: March Madness pools.
"So, obviously, had Memphis not cheated Texas would be the National Champions."
Yes, because everyone knows one win against a team ensures all future wins that season, although how would you explain Texas splitting with Oklahoma, OK State, Texas A&M, Baylor, Kansas State this past season?