FSU to forefeit wins, sanctioned

ESPN.com said:

NCAA penalties extend to 10 FSU sports
By Heather Dinich
ESPN.com

The Florida State football team will vacate an undetermined number of wins, serve four years' probation, and face a reduction in scholarships and other penalties due to what the NCAA described Friday as "major violations" from an academic cheating scandal.

Nine other programs were also penalized -- baseball, men's track and field, women's track and field, men's swimming, women's swimming, men's basketball, women's basketball, softball and men's golf -- and face the same sanctions. Overall, the scandal involved 61 athletes.

Football coach Bobby Bowden would have entered the coming season with 382 career victories, trailing Penn State coach Joe Paterno by one win on the all-time list. The sanctions will force him to forfeit all wins during which ineligible students competed in 2006 and 2007.

It is not immediately clear how many wins Florida State will have to vacate. Dennis Thomas, the vice chair of the Committee on Infractions and acting chair for the FSU case, said only one ineligible player would have had to participate in a game for the entire team record has to be vacated.

"We believe that the NCAA confirmed that our investigative efforts and our self-imposed penalties were appropriate," Florida State president T.K. Wetherell said in a statement Friday. "We already began implementing our self-imposed penalties. And we will begin implementing all but one of the NCAA's additional sanctions.

"We just don't understand the sanction to vacate all wins in athletics contests in which ineligible student-athletes competed because we did not allow anyone who we knew was ineligible to compete. Our position throughout the inquiry was that as soon as we knew of a problem, they didn't play."

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