There was a recent case (Arkansas?) where the university discovered an issue, brought it to the NCAA with a self-recommended number of forfeits, and the NCAA increased the number of forfeits in the punishment. That leads me to believe that institutional knowledge may not be necessary.
I do know I’m not going to try and decipher the NCAA rule book to figure this out though! LOL
Yeah that's pretty much a waste of time as it's pretty arbitrary :-)