McCready: Nuance, perspective required to forecast Freeze's future

MORE: NCAA delivers blow in this multi-faceted fight | Ole Miss video transcript

OXFORD | The sun rose Thursday.

If you’re an Ole Miss fan looking for positives a day after the NCAA issued its amended notice of allegations, one that included the worst charge it can levy _ lack of institutional control _ that’s it.

Wednesday night, hours after Ole Miss released a video featuring chancellor Jeffrey Vitter, athletics director Ross Bjork and coach Hugh Freeze, the media reaction came in waves.

One side, the side that blindly defends Ole Miss regardless of truth or logic, called the NCAA case only a witch hunt, denied an allegation that prospects received merchandise from Rebel Rags and denied an allegation that an Ole Miss booster gave Leo Lewis at least $13,000 during his recruitment in 2014.

The other side, the one that has been fed by NCAA leaks for the better part of the past four years, came at Ole Miss and Freeze with righteous indignation. That side noted on Wednesday night that defiance and deliberate misinformation were out at Ole Miss. That side stuck to its guns Wednesday, saying Ole Miss’ rise to national contender and Sugar Bowl champs was a result of nothing but cheating and Wednesday’s notice of allegations served as proof.

Both sides are wrong. To truly understand what has happened at Ole Miss since February 2013 requires nuance and context. Those who blindly defend Ole Miss, as well as those who vigorously attack it, don’t have and don’t want either nuance or context.

Take Rebel Rags, for example. The NCAA alleges that a staff member directed prospects and their families to the store for a discount and/or free items. That’s an improper benefit. It’s minor stuff, sure. We’re talking T-shirts, sweatshirts and caps here, not new sports cars, but for the love of all things holy, most programs are smart enough to have some layers of separation.

Ole Miss has to dispute this allegation. Seriously, it has no choice. If it’s proven, the cheating is traced right back into the Manning Center, right into the football offices.

As for the allegation involving Lewis, Ole Miss didn’t take a firm stance one way or the other Wednesday. Instead, the university left itself some wiggle room. In January, sources told RebelGrove.com the NCAA investigators felt they could prove how the payment to Lewis was made. Sources kept telling us one name, but they couldn’t tell us if that name were a first name or a last name. They just knew one name. We knew Lewis’ name would be all over the NOA (hello, Prospective Student-Athlete B), but we couldn’t nail down some of the details.

On Wednesday, those sources put it all together. We know the name now, and we’ll make an attempt to speak to him before we publish it. According to sources, the NCAA believes the booster delivered the money to Lewis and then confirmed the drop with Barney Farrar. Think about that for a minute. An Ole Miss staffer, knowing full well the school was being investigated by the NCAA and knowing full well his presence as an off-the-field coach/on-the-road recruiter was rustling feathers all over the Southeastern Conference, was allegedly involved in coordinating it.

Call that a witch hunt if you’d like. I call it idiotic if that's documented.

Yes, Virginia, everyone cheats in college football. I saw one prominent columnist with ties to another SEC program tweet Wednesday night that at least the coach at his alma mater, one he’s taken to task for key losses over the past couple of seasons, runs a clean program. I wanted to laugh. Or vomit. There’s no such thing as a clean program in the SEC or in Power-5 football. National college football reporters are an odd lot. No one loves the sport they cover more than that group, and they by God cling to the notion that it’s the supposed amateurism that makes it so attractive in the way a hungry puppy clings to his bone.

A clean Power-5 football program is akin to a mermaid, a unicorn or the Tooth Fairy. Sadly, those things, as beautiful as the mental images may be, don’t exist.

However, those programs run their cheating mechanism a hell of a lot smarter than what was alleged of Ole Miss on Wednesday. Those beautiful cars in parking lots and the cash prospects flash in those almost-immediately-deleted-but-screenshotted-for-perpetuity Instagram posts come from boosters. However, at programs with smart and layered cheating mechanisms, none of that can ever be traced back to the actual institution. Coaches maintain plausible deniability. Boosters do the dirty work and fans enjoy blissful ignorance on Saturday afternoons.

Two of the prospects named in Wednesday’s notice of allegations, Lewis and Kobe Jones, signed with Mississippi State. They were granted immunity by the NCAA to speak of their recruiting. A dangerous precedent has been set, and when and if a recording of Lewis’ mother asking for money from Ole Miss coaches becomes public domain, the NCAA either has to reluctantly open an investigation into Mississippi State or essentially admit that this was an agenda-driven investigation into Ole Miss.

What was the agenda? Oh, if I had a dollar for every time I was asked that question. Freeze took over at Ole Miss after the 2011 season. The Rebels were 2-10 in 2011, and Freeze coached his ass off. He landed junior college quarterback Bo Wallace and guided the Rebels to a 6-6 season and a spot in what is now the Birmingham Bowl. He then signed a top-10 national class that included Robert Nkemdiche, Laquon Treadwell, Tony Conner, Austin Golson and Laremy Tunsil. Only Golson and Tunsil’s names are included in the NOA, and it’s not pay-for-play stuff.

The rest of the SEC was perturbed and National Signing Day 2013 was chock full of accusation and innuendo. Freeze issued a tweet that week, challenging accusers to email Ole Miss’ compliance department with proof of the Rebels’ alleged cheating and to stop disparaging the young men who had signed national letters-of-intent. It was a dumb move, and Freeze has acknowledged that repeatedly.

The NCAA was already in Oxford, investigating the school’s women’s basketball program. When it did some preliminary interviews with Ole Miss about the 2013 football class, at least one of those interviews went poorly. Freeze was unprepared for his initial meeting with NCAA investigators, and that meeting got heated. According to sources, the investigation got personal that spring and has stayed that way ever since, culminating in Wednesday’s amended NOA, one that charged Freeze with violating the NCAA’s head coach responsibility legislation.

Freeze will dispute that charge. He has to. If he’s found guilty of it and if Ole Miss gets hit with lack of institutional control, it’s difficult to see a path in which he stays on as the Rebels’ head football coach. The NCAA investigators want a multi-year bowl ban and the scholarship losses that would accompany those charges would set Ole Miss’ program back substantially. Freeze will have to show that the coaches named in the NOA acted as rogue agents on the recruiting trail. He’ll have to display plausible deniability. He’ll have to prove to the COI that he didn’t know about the alleged payment to Lewis, the allegedly free (or heavily discounted) gear at Rebel Rags or the allegedly free meals for prospects at an Oxford establishment.

The meeting in front of the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions promises to be, as one official said late Wednesday, intense. The committee is comprised of smart people. They’ll have to sort through two completely different presentations. How they use nuance, common sense and perspective will be fascinating.

Ole Miss will host a junior day on Saturday. From a practical standpoint, the program needs impact players now more than it has since, well, 2013. All of those prospects who show up in Oxford Saturday will have questions, most of which won’t be answered until the infractions committee makes its ruling.

Early next month, a football team, one that now has no hope of a postseason, will begin spring drills. In the back of every mind on those practice fields will be one question: Who will be the coach in September? That question won’t be answered for a while. Blind defenders have written Freeze couldn’t be safer. Antagonists have already begun to publish his coaching obituary. The truth is his fate lies in the hands of Vitter, Bjork and/or the COI.

The flow of news will likely come to a screeching halt for a while now. Ole Miss has 90 days to formally answer the new allegations. Until then, those breathlessly following this case and waiting for its conclusion are going to have to navigate their way through an abyss of misinformation and agenda-driven drivel.

It won’t be easy to truly decipher. Nothing in this saga has been.