Do retroactive penalties belong in season standings after a leaked packet?

We found out two weeks later that one semifinal packet had been shared in a private group chat. There is no proof the first-place team opened it, but the distribution itself is documented. Do you freeze the standings or strip results anyway to protect the league?

Transparency beats certainty here. Publish the timeline, void the packet if contamination is plausible, and explain why the remedy is procedural rather than accusatory. Players can live with a replay more easily than a secretive ruling.

Retroactive penalties should be the last resort. If you cannot identify an advantaged team, punish the process that failed, not the standings table.

Agreed on process over punishment. But if the leaked packet materially affected who reached the final, then doing nothing is also a decision with consequences.

I would void the semifinal results and replay from that round forward. Messy, yes, but cleaner than spending months arguing whether someone probably looked at a file.

Make sure the public statement separates "packet was compromised" from "team cheated." Those are related questions, but they are not the same question, and people conflate them immediately.

If you replay, preserve the current standings table in an appendix for recordkeeping. Historical clarity matters when future players ask why a season has duplicate semifinal dates.

Thanks all. I am drafting a notice that voids the contaminated semifinal packet, schedules a replay, and explicitly says no finding of team misconduct has been made.