“Since the definition of a sentence in Standard English is a construction consisting of a subject noun phrase and a predicate verb phrase, by definition, the answer is that you can’t have a verbless sentence, even short ones: Ice melts, Ducks quack, Winter sucks, etc.— a main verb has to be there.”
The title in question was especially bad as it didn’t make sense due to the omitted verb, but still had the structure of a standard sentence, making it even harder to interpret. I am a native English speaker which is why I remember every grammar lesson from pre-k through college saying that a sentence needs to have both a subject and a verb. Sometimes, the subject is implied, like in an imperative sentence, but that’s the exception, not the rule.
And I’m not trying to be a total stickler abt grammar just for the sake of it, but because it is actively poisoning readability and we shouldn’t be rewarding it whether malicious as another commenter had suggested or just out of laziness. There’s no effect that the writer here is achieving by cutting the words the were cut.
I’ll also add that that wikipedia article uses that ‘Jones Winner’ thing, but it would be much less ambiguous to just say ‘Jones Wins’ and so you shoud pretty much always use the second. If this headline wanted to eliminate unnecessary words to minimize wordcount or something, they could easily have taken out their superfluous adjectives rather than the verb which severely hindered readability.