Re: Yahoo Sources: NCAA to formally charge Mississippi with rules violations
As a follow-up to some of the posts that came after mine, the NCAA of today is not the NCAA on the 1980s/1990s. I've got to admit, even with the number of people currently questioning Ole Miss' success (that's about as diplomatic as I can put it), I don't see this as a sure thing that Ole Miss will end up penalized for misdeeds. The NCAA is in a tough spot. For one thing, the NCAA isn't really in charge anymore; the Power 5 is. The NCAA is trying to walk a line between keeping lassos around the wild horses, while realizing what's paying the bills right now are those same wild horses. If the NCAA doesn't want to give a little bit of a gray area, the Power 5 leaving to form its own organization is a real possibility. We're not going back to the time when barely-trained investigators and officials with grudges played with the enforcement and infractions guidelines like they were some kind of toy.
On the other hand, teams that do something egregious -- Syracuse basketball, North Carolina, etc. -- must be punished to some degree to maintain the integrity of the organization. If the NCAA is going to take a NASCAR, "have at it, boys" attitude toward compliance, I would recommend Alabama get down and dirty with the rest of them. There's no sense in being the only do-gooder on the block if everyone else wants to be a villain.
Rodney Orr at TiderInsider mentioned a few weeks back that Ole Miss had likely received a letter. The Rebels were clearly trying to keep it under wraps until after Signing Day had passed, which means someone, likely at the NCAA itself, purposefully leaked this letter to do damage. That tells me the NCAA isn't going to let Ole Miss skate. How bad it gets is anyone's guess. It will depend on how much dirt the NCAA can dig up once they get on campus. They used old violations to get them to Oxford; now they've got to find new violations to really hammer the current regime. This is, incidentally, the same tactic the NCAA took against Alabama in 2000, when it used old violations (the Beamon case, Kenny Smith) to tie Albert Means to Bama's previous probation and make it a "pattern".