The NCAA is "vacating" 14 Florida State wins because sixty-one athletes cheated on an online music history course.

What you ask, is vacating?

It is not a forfeit, because the teams who lost to FSU won't have a victory added to their records.  Statistics of individual players won't be affected.  But the team record will be adjusted to reflect the use in ineligible players and Bobby Bowden will not be credited with the wins.

Bowden, previously one win behind Joe Paterno on the all-time coaching wins list, is now fifteen down.

So, let's see what's what.

According to the NCAA, there were fourteen games in which players scored touchdowns, punted, ran, kicked field goals, passed for yardage, and tackled.  All those things occurred.  But Florida State didn't win and Bobby Bowden had nothing to do with it.

In the games the same players participated in which Florida State lost, the games counted and Bowden takes a loss.  All the stats count.

Why?

Because, alone among all the organizations in the world today, the NCAA can adjust reality.  Quietly, and without public notice, the NCAA is hard at work rewriting the entire history of college football to remove an past unpleasantness.

O.J. Simpson has been vacated from USC and didn't win the Heisman trophy.

Knute Rockne's plane flight in Kansas was vacated.

Nothing which happened off the field involving any University of Miami football player in the 1980s and 1990s really took place.  These events, if spoken of at all, are being classified as "suspicious activity of an undetermined and unquantifiable nature unrelated to the NCAA or any of its member institutions".

The accusations of sexual assault at the University of Colorado between 1997 and 2004 have been vacated.

The Southern Conference does not exist and is a figment of your imagination.

Steve Spurrier?  We have no record of anyone by that name.

The 1997 point shaving scandal at Boston College?  Didn't happen.

The twenty-four Florida Gator football players arrested since Urban Meyer arrived on campus have had all criminal activity vacated it what were reclassified as "a series of unfortunate misunderstandings".

Southern Methodist University never existed.

No Alabama football player ever sold improperly acquired textbooks.  This incident has been vacated.  Instead, the Alabama players will now be reported as collecting used text books to distribute to local high school students as part of a mentoring program voluntarily established by the players.

The University of Toledo is a rumor, and no point shaving ever occurred at that school.  If it exists.  Which we aren't saying it does.

The Northern Colorado backup punter who stabbed a teammate competing for the same job was cleaning fish and never stabbed his rival for the job.

Unfortunately for the NCAA, rewriting history usually doesn't succeed.  Nobody really cares which victories the authorities say count or don't.  The Bowden-Paterno record will be decided on the field and not in an administrative office.

The NCAA could do more good if it enacted real punishments instead of phony revisions after the fact.  Make FSU bowl inelligible for a season.  Take away more than the paltry two scholarships they voluntarily chose to give up.

There's one other thing the NCAA could have done.

Put some real chain of command accountability in football programs by suspending coaches.  If the FSU football program was as out of control as the NCAA maintains, then put Bowden on the bench.  It would send a powerful signal that today's millionaire coaches club could hardly ignore.

The only thing the NCAA has vacated at FSU is real responsibility.