Florida State has lost its appeal and will have to vacate wins from 2006 and 2007 in football and nine other sports involved in an academic misconduct scandal.

The NCAA Division I Infractions Appeals Committee released its decision to uphold the penalty Tuesday morning.

The school argued in its appeal that the Committee on Infractions did not specify what weight if any it gave the school for its cooperation during what became a joint investigation of that scandal that involved 61 student athletes. In other cases, that was sufficient for the Infractions Appeals Committee to overturn the penalty.

Although the Infractions Appeals Committee took the Committee on Infractions to task for not setting forth its analysis of how the school's efforts and own corrective actions played into the penalties it meted out, it affirmed the penalty, stating in its report, “The cooperative efforts of the university clearly did not outweigh the aggravating factors in this case – the nature, number, scope and seriousness of the violations.”

FSU athletics director Randy Spetman said school offiicals were surprised and disappointed by that decision.

““We believed that our administration did everything it possibly could to ferret out any and all improprieties in this matter,'' he said in a statement. 'We were confident that those efforts would have significant sway in the appeal, but they did not.”

This is the end of the appeals process so FSU must now calculate how many games must be vacated in each sport and has 90 days to file its report to the NCAA's statistics department.

“This will take some time; it is a detailed process,” Spetman said. “We didn’t believe it was a process we should go through unless the decision made it necessary.”

The process involves verifying which student-athletes were certified to compete in each of the 10 areas of athletics competition and whether they actually competed in events while ineligible. In addition to football, the sports include men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s swimming, men’s and women’s track, baseball, softball and men’s golf.

FSU should now have to vacate the 2007 men's outdoor track and field national championship and, in football, all seven wins from the 2007 season and, based on an analysis of documents obtained by the Times, and no more than five wins, and perhaps four, from the 2006 season.

“We will release the results of this verification process just as soon as we have finished,” Spetman said. “I do want to make it clear, however, that while we are losing victories in several sports under this decision, our athletics program will not suffer additional consequences, including the loss of any additional scholarships, or any ban on postseason or television appearances.”

The Infractions Appeals Committee also upheld the findings and the penalties against Brenda Monk, the former learning specialist who along with an academic advisor and a tutor were implicated in the scandal. It wrote that it found "no basis on which to overturn'' the Committee on Infractions.

"They were wrong and I think in the end that'll come out,'' said Brant Hargrove, Monk's attorney. "The facts will come out now that we're in the proper forum.''

Monk has filed a defamation suit against FSU and is seeking at least $600,000 in damages.