Forcing a school to vacate wins is entirely symbolic. There’s no way the NCAA can build a time machine and legislate the past, so they resort to the absurd, vaguely Orwellian practice of pretending the past never happened. This week, the NCAA announced that many of Ole Miss’s wins during the Hugh Freeze era have been vacated as part of ongoing punishments of Ole Miss football. Freeze himself, currently living his fever dream as the head coach of Liberty, probably isn’t losing too much sleep over it.
But the 2014 Ole Miss upset over Alabama, one of Mississippi’s great sporting moments, is no longer valid, and that’s sad.