Ole Miss, the NCAA and a social media Egg Bowl frenzy

Ole Miss fans were all in a quandary this past Friday. Answer the phone? Read the text messages or tweets? Check out the Facebook notifications? It was

Pat Forde

from

Yahoo.com

and he had Ole Miss in the subject lin

e. Yes, you know this is not a story about the new arena or the decision to flip from synthetic grass to the natural stuff. Let’s just say Forde and Ole Miss mix together about as well as oil and water.

Suffice to say, when the news broke that Ole Miss would be facing a possibility of 30 NCAA rules violations, that’s not good. Compound the fact, the letters (COA) were dropped. Of course, that means Committee On Infractions.

Not good, right? No, it’s not.

After Rebel fans finished hyperventilating and picking themselves up off the floor, they read the article linked here (click here).

As I read the article, I felt as if I had read something similar before. Say, a year and a half ago? Forde wrote very similar to what you are seeing above linked here (click here).

The main change is the addition of current football alleged improprieties involving former student athlete Laremy Tunsil. It should be noted, Ole Miss self imposed sanctions, in regards to future possible improprieties. Tunsil sat out seven games for “accepting impermissible benefits,” notes Forde.

Make no mistake, the NCAA and possible sanctions is nothing to shrug off. Ole Miss will have to answer questions and possibly incur penalties to both the women’s basketball program and its track and field program, as both appear to house most of the allegations, per the article penned by Forde. Where does that leave football?

Per Chadd Scott of Gridiron Now, only five of the “roughly 30” allegations concern football and of the five, the current staff is confident they are secondary violations. A report by SB Nation linked here also backs up Scott, noting an NCAA staffer tells Bud Elliott of TomahawkNation.com, “the vast majority” of the football allegations are more than two years old. The article goes on to say an Ole Miss source tells SB Nation senior reporter Steven Godfrey, the allegations date as far back as six years ago under then head coach Houston Nutt. The penalty will be light, in my opinion.

Ole Miss fans shrugged their shoulders. This is not good but it sure isn’t as bad as some are making it out to be. Many of the national media, along with media that covers the SEC, echoed the sentiments of the Ole Miss fans and administration. This simply would not be a monstrous ordeal for the football program going forward.

And Twitter erupted.

I’ll be honest, I thought I had a pretty good grasp on the hatred between Ole Miss and Mississippi State until last night. Mississippi State fans smelled blood and they pounced. They pounced hard.

Unfortunately for the maroon and white, the blow back for Ole Miss wasn’t nearly what they had hoped for, with all of the national media pointing out the actual substance of the article. Well, almost all of them. Some only chose to read the headlines.  In fairness, this NFL reporter could have knowledge of the situation the college reporters didn’t.

At the end of the day, not one person knew for a fact if Ole Miss had been issued a “Notice of Allegations” letter from the NCAA. Those questions were answered today, as AD Ross Bjork released a second statement noting more detail.

In the statement, Bjork confirmed what the fans, national and regional media thought and hypothesized; the allegations center around the previous staff and the addressed Tunsil situation. Barrett Sallee summed it up best in a tweet:

Ole Miss is currently hosting its biggest recruiting weekend of the year. Many thought the news leaking on the Friday the prospects were arriving would cause a loaded ship to sink. Prospects would flip to other schools, immediately become uninterested in Ole Miss and look for another place to play college football. So far, that’s not the case in the least, per reports from Yancy Porter of the Ole Miss Spirit.

I’m reminded of what a longtime Ole Miss fan told me today; “If you are upsetting Alabama on the recruiting trail, you must be doing something right.” There is indeed truth to the statement. Just look where Ole Miss is ranked in the SEC in recruiting currently via Scout.com.

A source from the athletic department tells Ole Hotty Toddy the football staff and administration look forward to this Wednesday becoming a historic day in Ole Miss football.

Judging by the chatter coming from the internet, it looks to be a star-studded Wednesday. At least in Oxford, anyway.