The Last Forfeit in College Football
“There are two instances in which NCAA statisticians change official won-lost records. They are: 1. When a case ruled on by the NCAA Committees on Infractions include penalties of forfeits or vacancies; or 2. By NCAA executive action”
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NCAA Policies, Page 23
The forfeit is not something seen nowadays in College Football. Sure, there are vacated wins, where a team that finishes the year 10-2 will have those wins erased, but a forfeit works a little differently. Instead of 0-2, that team would finish 0-12 if the NCAA ordered those games to be forfeited. Like I said, it doesn’t happen often nowadays. In fact, a forfeit hasn’t occurred during the 21st century. The last game to officially have been forfeited was on September 12th, 1998. Since it is the 21st anniversary of the occasion, let’s talk about it...
The Game
It was a rather cool day in College Station, relatively speaking. The number 17 Texas A&M squad was coming off of a 23-14 loss against the number 2 ranked Florida State Seminoles while Louisiana Tech had just been shellacked by Nebraska the prior week. Nobody expected A&M to lose to a Tech team that would wind up 7-5 at the end of the season. But that’s exactly what the Aggies did.
Technically.
Texas A&M would start the game 21-0 and wind up winning the game 28-7. So how the hell did Texas A&M lose? Well, it’s simple: they had an academically ineligible player playing on the field: D'Andre Hardeman.
Hardeman had a fantastic game for the Aggies: 79 rushing yards and 3 touchdowns. Two years prior, he had rushed for 669 yards and 17 touchdowns, so this wasn’t just a flash in the pan player. He was a bona fide star for the Aggies. After a bit of a down year in 1997 he looked to come back with a vengeance in 1998.
It would not come to pass.
The Forfeit
On September 23rd, Texas A&M announced that it would forfeit their victory over Louisiana Tech on September 12th. Coach Slocum had already suspended Hardeman before their game against Southern Miss. The athletic director of A&M, Wally Groff, would go on to suspend Hardeman the entire season, stating “A&M officials discovered an inadvertent clerical error in the posting of grades at the registrar’s office which resulted in Hardeman being cleared for competition... There was no impropriety in the erroneous posting of the grades. The error was clerical in nature and was made outside of the athletic department. Besides this clerical error, no violation of NCAA and Big 12 rules was found.″
Essentially, Groff was declaring that nobody was at fault for what was essentially a typo. While it’s unlikely A&M would have lost to Tech had Hardeman not played, it can’t be guaranteed (especially since he accounted for all three of A&M’s touchdowns). So, now the game sits in the record books as an A&M loss, one where they outscored Louisiana Tech 28-7.
Aftermath
Louisiana Tech would have a rather meh season, finishing it by being shellacked 63-30 by Tulane. Without the forfeit, they would have finished the season 6-6. With the newly acquired win, they finished 7-5 without a bowl appearance.
Texas A&M never took a poll hit from the “loss”, with the polls that came out on September 28th placing them 18th instead of 17th. They would string together 9 straight wins after Tech, including over Nebraska, defeat Kansas State in the Big 12 Championship and then fall to Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl. They refuse to accept the forfeit as a loss to this day.
D'Andre Hardeman, while he would be reinstated to the school in 1999, would never play another down for the Aggies. As of 2015, he was a mechanic for the city of Houston and personal trainer.
Wally Groff would relinquish his position as Athletic Director on December 31st, 2002, largely due to the new president of the university.