There are no penalties or infractions for which Syracuse would have been punished. The NCAA said Syracuse was not guilty of a "failure to monitor" or even "lack of institutional control" but was guilty of a "failure to be even remotely good."
"Failure to be even remotely good" does not carry any official sanctions with it.
Syracuse Athletic Director DOCTOR Daryl Gross said the university will appeal the NCAA's finding and the ruling that Syracuse cannot erase their losses from the 2005 season.
The Orange went 1-10 in the 2005 season, their worst in the 118 year history of the program. Records in ineptitude from that season involving quarterback Perry Patterson and their woeful offense won't be erased, the NCAA said, and coach Greg Robinson's career record will be not be amended to reflect the erased losses. It will remain at 5-18.
Syracuse does have the right to self-impose sanctions and has taken several actions, including banning football players from continuing to suck until at least the 2009-2010 academic year or until they graduate and they're "someone else's problem."
When reached on his cell phone, Robinson said he did not pay any attention to the infractions committee's ruling on Syracuse, saying "I'm not here to talk about the past."
"I have no idea why we can't just pretend 2005 never happened. Baseball is forgetting an entire decade ever happened, all we're asking for is one lousy season. And I mean lousy." Robinson said.
Paul Dee, the athletic director at Miami and the interim chairman of the NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions, said Syracuse will be allowed to keep the money it received for playing the 2005 season adding, "I mean, they can keep the money their fans paid for that horrible excuse for a football season. I wouldn't."
"There doesn't actually appear to be any case of violations involving any student-athletes, so the committee finds this case to be insignificant and not serious for several reasons," the NCAA report said, noting the fact that Syracuse administrators had also appeared before the committee in April 2007 regarding violations it felt its men's basketball program suffered by not making the NCAA tournament, asking that their NIT appearance be stricken from the record books as well.
Dee said Wednesday that Syracuse should not be praised for trying to trick people into forgetting 2005 ever happened, calling that action "extremely retarded."
The committee recommended that Syracuse undertake more extensive efforts to improve on-field appearance and worry more about winning games.
Gross disagreed, saying in a statement that "any mistakes made in 2005 were clearly the work of evil thetans living inside the members of the football team who need to be purged of these unclean entities. The university is blameless."
Robinson said he "strongly supported" Gross's decision that thetans were to blame.
"Our current team is really good," Robinson said. "We're talking about a matter that relates to the 2005 season. That's ancient history. This group of players and those that will join our program later have no reason to be concerned with what happened back then. It might as well have never happened, which is exactly what we're trying to make happen.