Sometimes the most dramatic storylines in Texas high school football don’t happen under the lights. They happen in meetings, minutes, and rulings that never make the evening highlights.
This week, while prepping for my broadcast of College Park’s second-round playoff game against Cypress Lakes, I stumbled into one of those rare twists: a single forfeiture that managed to wreck a perfect season for one team and end a three-year losing streak for another.
And nobody even had to take a snap.
College Park: 10–0 on the Field… 9–1 on Paper
College Park High School in The Woodlands didn’t just have a good year — they had a dominant one.
They ran the table in the regular season. They’ve won their first playoff game. They looked every bit the part of a team catching genuine postseason momentum.
But officially?
They aren’t 10–0. They’re 9–1, because the University Interscholastic League ruled that College Park used an ineligible player in their season opener against Cypress Park.
The Cavaliers won that game convincingly — 73–6 on the field. But in the books, that result is gone. Replaced with a neat, sterile 2–0 forfeit loss.
That’s the part of high-school football most fans never see: a perfect season can evaporate for reasons that have nothing to do with effort, coaching, or competitive performance. Nobody outplayed College Park in Week 1. Nobody unlocked a game-plan flaw. Nobody exploited a mismatch.
- It was paperwork.
- It was eligibility.
- It was a technicality.
And somehow, the season shifted without a single snap — just a ruling on paper, drifting in nearly ten weeks after the fact, when both joy and disappointment from that night had already settled into memory.
Cypress Park: Ending a Losing Streak Without Winning a Game
Now flip the camera angle.
Cypress Park came into 2025 carrying one of the longest on-field losing streaks in Texas.
They hadn’t won a game on the field in over four years. They’d gone 0–10 in 2022, 2023, and 2024. The streak stood at 41 straight losses, ironically including a first-round playoff loss in 2021.
And on the field, 2025 didn’t improve anything. They went 0–10 again.
But officially?
They finished 1–9 — because that same eligibility ruling awarded them a forfeit victory over College Park in Week 1.
Meaning the streak is technically over.
Broken by a win nobody saw, celebrated, or even realized happened until the standings quietly updated last week, after the Tigers had turned in all their gear and equipment for the season.
You could argue they “ended the streak,” but you could also argue they didn’t — not in any way the coaches, players, or fans would recognize as a true moment of progress.
It’s the most bittersweet kind of win: a win that changes nothing except the column it goes in.
A Small Mercy… or a Feeling More Complicated?
There’s also a strange emotional wrinkle here: Cypress Park’s senior class will now graduate with an official career record of 1–39 instead of 0–40, despite never winning a game on the field.
I don’t know if that makes the forfeit feel like a small mercy…or a reminder of how much these kids endured without ever getting the payoff they fought for week after week.
We Don’t Know the Details Yet — And Honestly, They Don’t Change Much
What’s especially unusual here is that, as I write this, there aren’t many public details available about the ruling itself. We don’t know:
- Who the ineligible player was
- How the issue was discovered
- Whether it was self-reported
- Whether it came from district executive committee action
- Or whether it was sparked by a paperwork audit and nothing more
And to be fair, it doesn’t really matter.
Whatever happened, it’s almost certain the player in question had little or no effect on the outcome of a game College Park won 73–6. They dominated that night — thoroughly and without doubt.
They shouldn’t feel embarrassed. They shouldn’t feel tarnished. Ten weeks later, this ruling changes nothing about the team that actually took the field.
And Cypress Park? They can at least feel relief that the record books no longer reflect a 41-game losing streak.
No athlete deserves to carry that kind of statistical weight into an offseason, especially when they’ve been grinding, practicing, preparing, and showing up every week despite the losses.
So yes — the ruling shifted the numbers. But it didn’t change the story each team lived.
Two Programs, One Ruling, Opposite Worlds
You almost couldn’t script it:
- College Park: Lost a perfect regular season the same day
- Cypress Park: Gained a streak-ending “win” the same day
And neither outcome reflects what happened between the lines.
That’s the dual nature of high school sports governance — one administrative decision can reshape narratives, standings, streaks, and even perceptions of an entire season.
But the kids on both teams still lived a different reality:
- College Park earned every win on the field.
- Cypress Park fought through every loss on the field.
- And the forfeit didn’t change either team’s experience — just the paperwork around it.
The Part I Keep Thinking About
Maybe it’s the broadcaster in me, or maybe it’s the dad in me, but I can’t help thinking about the athletes.
College Park’s kids didn’t get to taste a 10–0 regular season, even though they earned one.
Cypress Park’s kids didn’t get to feel the energy of breaking a losing streak, even though they technically did.
Two very different teams. Two very different seasons. Pulled together by one administrative decision.
And it also makes me wonder about what comes next — especially for College Park. A ruling like this can sit in the back of a team’s mind in different ways. For some, it eats at you. For others, it sharpens the edge.
I don’t know yet whether this forfeiture becomes a quiet frustration or a rallying point, but I’m curious to see how it shapes the way they move through the rest of the playoffs. Sometimes these things harden a team. Sometimes they fuel them.
And in a strange way, all of this shows both the fragility and the resilience of high school football:
- Fragility, because a season can be altered by a ruling nobody anticipated.
- Resilience, because the kids keep playing anyway — for pride, for each other, and for the love of the game.
Leave a comment