NCAA outlines Florida State penalties

TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Oct. 15 (UPI) -- The NCAA's plan to strip Florida State coaches and players of victories for academic cheating, whether implicated or not, was detailed in a report Wednesday.

Head football Coach Bobby Bowden would lose 14 wins if the proposed penalties go into effect. Bowden trails Penn State's Joe Paterno by only four victories in the race for major college football's winningest coach.

Florida State, which reported the violations to the NCAA, has instituted self-imposed penalties, including loss of scholarships and player suspensions. The school is appealing only the plan to take victories away from coaches and more than 500 athletes in 10 sports, the Florida Times-Union, one of the news outlets that sued to force release of the document, reported.

FSU and NCAA staffers previously agreed that 61 athletes implicated in the cheating, mostly on exams for an online music course, would be suspended for 30 percent of a season. That included about 25 football players who served their suspensions in 2007 and 2008.

Most of the transcript of an Oct. 18, 2008, hearing by the NCAA's Committee on Infractions is a rehash of information previously released by the school. It does show, however, that the idea of vacating wins is based on the belief an athlete is ineligible from the time he or she committed academic fraud, even though it might not have been discovered until some time later.

The athletes could have faced complete ineligibility but received a reduced penalty because Florida State accepted most of the blame for what happened due to failures by faculty members and academic officials and tutors in the athletic department.