Back in January, the NCAA ruled it had found that a former Louisiana-Lafayette assistant had arranged fraudulent ACT exam scores for five Ragin’ Cajun football players, who were subsequently ruled ineligible. As part of their punishment, the university was to determine in which games ineligible players had been used and vacate any of those games that were won.
On Thursday, UL-L announced those determinations.
A total of 22 wins from the 2011-14 seasons have been vacated by the football program, the school confirmed. Eight of the wins came from the 2011 and 2013 seasons, four from 2012 and two from 2014. Other than the wins in the 2011 and 2013 New Orleans Bowls, no specific games that were vacated have been identified.
A co-championship in the Sun Belt Conference in 2013 was also vacated.
“While it is disappointing to vacate these victories and championships, we finally put this chapter behind us and will continue to grow our championship football program,” athletic director Scott Farmer said in a statement. “We stand behind the integrity and accomplishments of Coach Mark Hudspeth, members of his coaching staff and each of our student-athletes who played football during the Hudspeth era.”
Mark Hudspeth has been the Ragin’ Cajuns head coach since 2011. It was found by the NCAA that Hudspeth’s assistant, David Saunders, had acted on his own in the testing scheme and without the knowledge of the head coach or anyone else on the staff. Saunders was also found to have paid cash benefits to a recruit as well as misleading and ultimately failing to cooperate with investigators.
Saunders was hit with an eight-year show-cause and is no longer at UL-L, having moved on to become the head coach junior college in Mississippi.
From 2011-14, Hudspeth had led the Ragin’ Cajuns to nine wins each season. With the vacated wins, Hudspeth’s official coaching record will go from 40-24 to 18-24.
In addition to the vacated wins, the program was placed on two years of probation, fined $5,000 and stripped of six scholarships over the next two years.
