Texas A&M football fans know that there are few penalties more controversial in college football than purposeful pushing. The crackdown on head-to-head contact is obviously a good thing, but the way it is enforced often goes against the sensibilities of college football fans.

The penalty itself is imposed in a variety of contexts, with little attention being paid to how the contact occurs. For example, accidental and light contact or contact initiated by an attacking player is penalized in the same way as a direct hit by a defender – often to the chagrin of spectators.

Part of it is how severe the penalty is for targeting: if you commit the penalty in the first half of a game, you’re out for the rest of the game, but if you commit the penalty in the second half, you’ll have to sit out the first half of the following game as well.

Unfortunately, this even applies across seasons and teams. So if you commit a targeting penalty in the second half of the last game of the season and then transfer, you’ll have to sit out the first half of your first game with the new team. That’s exactly what happened to Aggie DB Jaydon Hill, who transferred here from Florida last offseason.

So yes, an Aggie player will miss time in one of the most important games of the year for a penalty committed over eight months ago on another team. That’s one of the most… unusual situations I think I’ve ever heard of in my time watching the sport.