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ABSTRACT
Sometimes, teams or players violate the rules of their leagues or associations. And sometimes, their leagues or associations respond by striking their wins from the official record. Especially in American college sports governed by the NCAA, this practice of vacating results is unpopular and widely decried. It should not be. Vacating wins can be an appropriate response to rules violations in higher-order competitions in the same way that it can be appropriate to call back a scoring play due to a penalty. We outline the conceptual framework that makes sense of when, why, and how it is appropriate to vacate wins.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Two subsequent Tour winners, Floyd Landis (2006) and Alberto Contador (2010), have also been stripped of their titles for similar violations.
2. See, for example, (Passan Citation2015).
3. Hämäläinen (Hämäläinen Citation2016) briefly discusses changing official results as a way of restoring justice. Our view is consonant with, but different from, Hämäläinen’s.
4. This is one reason the common Monopoly house rule that rewards players who land on ‘Free Parking’ is a bad rule. Its reward is independent of skillful play, increasing the luck or chance element of the game and diminishing the role of skill.
5. This will leave open questions such as ‘who really won?’ and ‘who would have won?’ had the offending team or player not competed. Though many will chafe at the resulting uncertainty, it is unavoidable in any case. Even when we are confident that only eligible teams or players competed, knowing who wins doesn’t settle the questions of which team is better or best. It is a comforting fiction to think that on-field, head-to-head results settle such questions even in the best circumstances (see (Bordner Citation2015)). And if there are reasons to think one or more teams or players should not have been allowed to compete, those questions will remain whether or not the results are vacated. Vacating results in such cases has the benefit – which retroactive forfeiting lacks – of honestly and publicly acknowledging the uncertainty about who would or should be considered the winner.
6. A forfeit awards victory to an opponent. In some higher-order games, such ‘unearned’ rewards may be undesirable. Consider a league in which teams compete for the best win-loss average, but not every team plays every other team. If a team that fields ineligible players forfeits, then their lower-order game opponents are scoring points in the higher-order competition not because of their own skillful play within the rules, but because they happened to draw a rules-violating opponent. A league might prefer to vacate results instead of rewarding teams for playing against teams that break the rules.
7. The best defense of formalism is by (Suits Citation2005). For a helpful overview of the state of debate, see (Kretchmar Citation2015), (Simon Citation2015), and (Morgan Citation2015).
8. See (Bordner Citation2019).
9. This is consonant with J.S. Russell’s (Citation1999) ‘first principle of games adjudication’: rules should be interpreted in such a manner that the excellences embodied in achieving the lusory goal of the game are not undermined but are maintained and fostered.
10. This is an easy distinction to overlook since, when a football play is called back due to a foul, there is both a nullification of the play and a penalty: the result of the original play is wiped away and the down is replayed after the penalty is imposed.
11. See (Chase Citation2012).
12. A recent controversial LLB vacation involved a team that violated LLB’s geographic regulations rather than its age restrictions. The Jackie Robinson West team from Chicago was stripped of its U.S. title after it was found to have used players that lived outside its district. To the extent that geographic restrictions on eligibility might be seen as less justified than age restrictions, we would expect vacations to be more controversial when due to geographic violations than when due to age-limit violations.
13. See (Bordner Citation2015).
14. But it’s not the only possible reasonable approach. If the rules allowed for it, we can see no strong reason to prefer vacation to recording USC’s victories as losses without crediting their opponents with victories.
15. Similar reasoning would apply if a non-Little League team were to nominally win the Little League World Series. Even if those players could have constituted a Little League team by conforming to LLB’s rules for putting a team together, if they aren’t a Little League team, they can’t win a Little League championship title.