…but really:

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 NCAA 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 to be vacated. Still, Thomas said the NCAA had no evidence the university knowingly played ineligible athletes.

Florida State is considering appealing the sanction that would force the Seminoles to vacate wins.

"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."

I say FSU is right. If a school can be shown to be turning a blind eye to such violations, or is on probation for previous violations, then forfeiting wins may be necessary. Otherwise, it's just vindictive and dumb, because it does nothing for anyone. It doesn't help the teams who were harmed, and it doesn't penalize the team going into the future.

It's especially dumb and vindictive when the school has an active record of careful monitoring and takes all the appropriate steps as soon as it knows something is wrong. When OU found out in 2006 that its starting quarterback was illegally taking money for work he didn't do, the school reported it immediately and threw him off the team permanently. The starting quarterback at a team that had looked like a national championship contender. When the NCAA said OU had to forfeit every win that Bomar participated in for the 2005 season, it was dumb and vindictive—and was overturned on appeal.

So it should be with Florida State. I understand the idea behind making teams forfeit past wins, but if the school did not know despite active monitoring, it's just mean and pointless.