re: In the last 40 years Notre Dame has 1 NC.

quote:

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They forfeited wins due to academic fraud a few years ago.

They can read but had give out false grades

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That’s literally the exact opposite of what happened. A student who was technically an athletic department employee because she had a job with the athletic department cheated for five players. This led to two problems:

1. Impermissible benefits from an athletic department employee.
2. It violated the honor code at ND. This led to the students, retroactively, receiving failing grades for the courses after it was discovered. This meant that, retroactively, their GPAs were below the NCAA threshold for eligibility. (So, ironically, it was ND’s own academic policy that caused this. If ND’s policy allowed the students to keep their grades for the course but get put on academic probation, then the players wouldn’t have been ineligible for this particular reason as their GPAs wouldn’t have dropped below the threshold. Issue #1, however, would have still been a problem and ND would’ve still had to forfeit the wins).

This is not an excuse to say ND shouldn’t have forfeited the wins. Either (and both) of those reasons made the players ineligible so any games in which any of the five played should’ve been forfeited. But it wasn’t for false grades. Quite the opposite.

There’s a reason the punishment was only vacated wins (because of the reasons 1 & 2 above) and not a postseason ban or loss of scholarships (because there was not a lack of institutional control or widespread fraud or anything like that).