Kellenberger: Ole Miss getting hammered by NCAA

It’s taken years, but we can finally say this: Ole Miss is not beating the rap.

It is not eluding the NCAA investigators. It is not getting away with something, or going to be able to change all of the charges from felonies to misdemeanors, so to speak.

An amended notice of allegations given to Ole Miss today by the NCAA is damning, alleging thousands of dollars in illegal payments to a recruit and detailing the activities of a former staff member in facilitating these payments, amid other illegal activity.

Ole Miss will not play in a bowl game in 2017, it decided and announced before the NCAA could tell it that’s going to be the case. Ole Miss will miss out on the postseason payment from the Southeastern Conference, which is $7.8 million. And this is all before Ole Miss goes in front of the Committee on Infractions later this year, where the university will have to fight against a lack of institutional control charge as well as punishment that will potentially be levied toward coach Hugh Freeze.

My guess: The fight will be about extending the bowl ban to a second year, or not; how many scholarships Ole Miss will lose over the next four or five years; and whether Freeze is going to have to serve a suspension because he runs the program and therefore bears ultimate responsibility for it.

It’s worth noting that there’s nothing in the notice of allegations (at least that we’re aware of; the university has not released it but did post a 20-minute video with Chancellor Jeff Vitter, Athletic Director Ross Bjork and Freeze explaining the latest news) about former star Laremy Tunsil. It was Tunsil’s draft night admission that restarted the investigation and ultimately led the NCAA to go down the rabbit hole with former staffer Barney Farrar (who was named in the infamous text messages and was fired last year).

The offer of immunity to recruits who did not end up at Ole Miss but instead other SEC institutions also clearly paid off; the most damning allegation, that boosters provided a recruit with $13,000 to $15,600 in cash payments, likely came from that.

So ultimately, the draft night fiasco proved to be Ole Miss’ undoing, if not in the way we expected that night.

Ole Miss, frankly, has played a lot of this wrongly. The very first public statement from the school after draft night should have been that Farrar was being placed on leave while a complete investigation followed. Allowing him to stay on the job for another six months was only going to damage the school's credibility with the Committee on Infractions. Faced with evidence that Farrar was taking care of a player’s financial needs, Ole Miss pretended it was business as usual. To what end? It defies logic.

No one who is not an Ole Miss fan right now is going to believe anything the school says about the investigation totally, because the university abused that privilege last year. It played games with numbers and lied. It kept on saying it was ready to make its case public, but denied every opportunity to do so.

It’s been months since I talked to anyone connected to Ole Miss who expressed any degree of positivity toward the resolution of the NCAA investigation and what the document the school received today would contain. Instead it’s been hope that it’ll just all one day be over, and that they’ll know the full extent of their punishment.

Well, we’re on the path to the end. And it’s already bad, and it’s getting worse. I sincerely doubt Ole Miss can beat the lack of institutional control charge, just because both notices of allegations do show widespread cheating that goes back years. That used to be Ole Miss’ defense: “This predates Hugh Freeze.” Now it may be part of its undoing.

For a long time I doubted whether this was all going to stick with Ole Miss, and it was always because I was just skeptical that the NCAA had the investigative teeth to really dig into a program, if it spent years trying. I was wrong. Notices of allegations are one-sided documents; it’s the NCAA’s side, and it’s not unlike the prosecution making its case in a way that best sets up its argument. But what it is alleging is damning.

Ole Miss will defend itself from things. It might even win a battle or two. But the war is over, and all that’s left is to decide the full scale of the damage.