Re: Yahoo Sources: NCAA to formally charge Mississippi with rules violations
There are a few things going on here and I think we have to keep those in mind.
One, we have some shell-shocked Alabama fans wondering if Ole Miss will "get it" to. I think without a doubt they deserve to get hammered, but that NCAA does indeed seem to be a thing of the past. They aren't going to bomb a program back to the stone age in the way they did it to SMU. They aren't going to hammer a program like they did to Alabama either.
The other is the reminder of the Cam Newton saga, in which it was on the record fact that he was shopped around by his father, who also steered him to Auburn. This was as close as you could get to a public confession of his being paid, yet nothing at all came of it. We'll never be able to reconcile that NCAA with the one that repeatedly stuck it to Alabama. We'll never be able to figure out how textbooks were a bigger deal than Cam Newton getting paid to go to Auburn. We won't figure out how North Carolina and Miami got off lightly. There's no reasonable standard to explain that.
I don't think we need to figure that part out though. In this case, Ole Miss isn't a program like Ohio State, capable of just shrugging off a NCAA wrist slap. This is a program that has to have everything working in their favor to be able to reel in the classes they did. They need people behind the scenes providing the compensation, they need to be able to pretend the program is headed in the right direction, and they need a head coach who is plausibly competent enough to bring it all together. Even the NCAA sniffing around seemed to throw them off their ridiculous, magical, we can land anyone who has us on our list recruiting prowess.
Even though Miami got off with a wrist slap, they are still so off their game that a losing season has become far easier for them than double digit wins. How about Boise State, who after a visit by the NCAA has largely been out of the national conversation, and coincidentally is without their coach, who previously seemed unwilling to leave.
I don't think Ole Miss will actually get hammered, not in the way they deserve, not in the way Alabama fans know the NCAA is capable of. I just don't happen to think they need to be. If the NCAA even pretends to do their job here, it should be enough to shut down the recruit buying factory in Mississippi. Hugh Freeze could decide it's time to look for work elsewhere, recruits could decide they don't want to become involved in that mess, and boosters might actually become hesitant to support a program no longer on the right track, while their actions face additional NCAA scrutiny.
We'll see... but this is about as easy a case for the NCAA as we've seen in a while, and it is also one of the most important. I don't think anyone really wants Ole Miss to keep doing what they've been doing outside of Ole Miss fans. It's a bad look for the SEC, the Big 10 and Big 12 surely can't appreciate having recruits snatched out from underneath them, and all the NCAA has to do is just take the proof they already have, and do their job.