Ole Miss vacating 33 football wins after violations
Ole Miss will vacate 33 total football wins from six seasons between 2010 and 2016 for fielding ineligible players, athletic director Ross Bjork said Monday night.
“It’s the last part of this process,” Bjork said at a town hall meeting in Cleveland, Miss. “In a way, it’s just a piece of paper, because you saw those games.”
Ole Miss received the sanctions after being accused of 15 Level I violations under coach Hugh Freeze. The NCAA panel on infractions said the school lacked institutional control and fostered “an unconstrained culture of booster involvement in football recruiting.”
The NCAA came down hard on the Ole Miss football program for lack of institutional control, penalizing the Rebels with a second bowl ban and additional scholarship restrictions.
The Rebels will vacate four wins from 2010, two from 2011, seven from 2012, seven from 2013, eight from 2014 and five from 2016.
The vacated wins include a 23-17 win over Alabama in 2014, with College GameDay in town, that resulted in students storming the field and goalposts coming down. The goalposts became folk heroes, touring the campus and visiting after-parties.
Some of the charges date back to the tenure of previous coach Houston Nutt, who was fired in 2011, but most of the case involves conduct that happened under Freeze. The sprawling case involves alleged academic, booster and recruiting misconduct.
Former offensive lineman Laremy Tunsil, now with the Miami Dolphins, was one of the players declared ineligible. He played in seven wins in 2013, now vacated, but sat out the first seven games of the 2015 while his eligibility was reviewed. He was then ruled ineligible and missed the rest of the season.
Nutt will now have 18 wins instead of 24 on the official record, and Freeze 12 wins instead of 39.
Mississippi had already served a two-year postseason ban in 2017 and 2018 and was given three years of probation, through 2020, as well as scholarship reductions and recruiting restrictions in sanctions handed down more than a year ago.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.